Curated FSM Press Bibliography
3,404 items

This bibliography covers printed journalism
related to the FSM from 1964 on, with many illustrative quotations, and such links to the
actual texts as we can provide. Its compilation is discussed in the introduction.
This list is far from exhaustive, esp. for 1964-1965. The reader is referred to Google News Archives.

Items in this bibliography begin in 1964,
the oldest at the bottom of this page

"The riots remain in planning stages, I am happy to report. But they wouldn't have been the first Berkeley riots in the age of Trump. The first took place about a week after Trump's inauguration, when former Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos was slated to give one of his witless 'talks' on campus. Leftist activists saved him the trouble by rampaging through campus and town, punishing for his alleged transgressions an outlet of Starbucks, which had recently committed to hiring thousands of refugees. It was an ugly scene that earned denunciations from both Fox News commentators and original members of the Free Speech Movement."

"Former ASUC president and National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement fellow Will Morrow, however, resents that conservatives have cast campus protests against conservative speakers as suppression of conservative speech rather than an expression of the protesters' own liberal speech -- to do so, Morrow believes, is to distort the values of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'These speakers want to come to Berkeley to provoke outrage and incite chaos under the guise of 'defending free speech' by deliberately misrepresenting the legacy of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement,' Morrow said in an email."

"Lee and others saw Dellums as a staunch supporter of three social movements that converged in the Bay Area during the 1960s: the free speech movement, the Black Panther Party movement, and the antiwar movement. It was a period of rowdy protests on college campuses and bloody standoffs between demonstrators and police."

"KIRCHICK: I think there is a fundamental difference. I graduated from Yale in 2006, and when I look back on the Halloween costume controversy and other controversies that are happening across campuses today, something snapped in the past couple years. There is a different notion of what freedom of speech means. If you look back at the last great student revolt in the United States, it was in the late 1960s, and you look at the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, what was that about? It was about protecting the rights of, you know, left-wing anti-Vietnam War student protesters having the right to speak. They wanted to resist power. And they wanted to resist the governments in cahoots with their universities clamping down on their freedom. What are students now calling for? They want to collude with power. They want to collude with the administration and the government to shut down people with whom they disagree. It's the complete and utter opposite of the spirit that the student protesters in the '60s were fighting for." [Ed note: the FSM had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. The background issue was Civil Rights.]

"University administrators, whose job it is to promote harmony and diversity on campus, often find the easiest way to do so is to placate the intolerant fifth.
¶
The two groups form an odd alliance. Contentious campus politics have been a constant feature of American life for more than 50 years, but during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, students at Berkeley demonstrated to win the right to determine who could say what.
¶
Now the opposite is true. Student activists are demanding that administrators interfere with teaching, asking for mandatory ethnic studies classes, the hiring of non-white or gay faculty and the ability to lodge complaints against professors for biased conduct in the classroom. This hands more power to administrators.
¶
College administrators at public universities are subject to the full demands of America's First Amendment, which allows, among other things, hate speech and flag burning. Federal courts have struck down every speech code enacted at a public university, and the Supreme Court has declared academic freedom a 'transcendent value' of 'special concern to the First Amendment'."

"When might a social movement decide that civil disobedience is appropriate? 'Direct action,' Hayes and colleagues note, 'is often an escalation and a tactical response to a system that is not offering acceptable outcomes.' Or, as Berkeley free speech movement activist Mario Savio once more dramatically put it:
¶
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
¶
So, if you are trying to stop the machine, how should you do so? Building on the work of Dean Spade, Peter Gelderloos, and others, Hayes, Kaba, and Trinidad provide a valuable concise guide of key questions to ask yourself, which are paraphrased below. These include:
¶
Does your action legitimize harmful institutions?
Does it legitimize or expand a system you are trying to dismantle? (For example, what does it mean to cooperate with cops as part of organizing your action? If the goal is to shrink the power of policing, why are you thanking them for their presence rather than calling for their removal?")
Does it have elite support?
Is the action colluding with power or resisting it?
Is there a clear demand that will improve the lives of the most marginalized?
To summarize: If you are colluding with authority and lack a clear demand, then you're doing something other than direct action. It also, the authors emphasize, matters who benefits from the action and who is organizing it."

"Oakland has been such fertile cultural ground for a variety of reasons. Geographically isolated on the east side of San Francisco Bay, the region became a center for African-American liberation in the early 20th century, with people moving from the rural South as part of the Great Migration. The subsequent influx of Latino and Asian immigrants 'made the area an unusual confluence, a place that offered a collective safety -- a unique cultural opportunity to be free and imaginative,' said Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Bay Area-based arts activist and performer.
¶
Add as kindling the Free Speech Movement (born at the nearby University of California, Berkeley) and oppression by a police department notorious for abuse and misconduct. The Black Panther Party originated here for a reason."

"The writers draw upon American history in portraying Tyrol as a union agitator. His speech bor-rows from Mario Savio's address to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement before its 1964 sit-in. In turn, the reference to putting bodies on the machine recalls both the protests of Luddite labor activists and Ghandi's supporters blocking railroad tracks."

"We are pleased to present the Sounds and Songs of Demonstrations, a verite-like sound production of moments and events during Free Speech Demonstrations at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and 1965."

"Cliff Maloney Jr., president of the national Young Americans for Liberty organization, praised the settlement and the university.
¶
'As the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and a public university, UC Berkeley has done the right thing in agreeing to respect the First Amendment in this matter,' Maloney said in a statement. 'I applaud the students for standing up for their constitutionally protected freedoms and advocating for a level playing field.'"

"But the beginning of the fall semester in 1964 gave a new direction to SDS: the explosion of the Berkeley Free Speech movement showcased the simmering anger among a new generation of students and showed the potential power of an organized student movement. SDS returned its attention to organizing on campus just as the Vietnam War was about to expand."

"In 2014, at a teach-in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Wendy Brown spoke against trigger warnings and in favor of exposing students to new ideas. 'When we demand, from the right or the left, that universities be cleansed of what's disturbing,' she said, 'we are complicit with the neoliberal destruction of the university.' Back then, Milo Yiannopoulos was still an obscure opinion journalist, and Donald Trump was still a reality-show magnate. 'I haven't radically shifted my position, but it's fair to say that I've shifted my emphasis,' Brown told me. 'I've become newly attuned to how free speech can be used as cover for larger political projects that have little to do with airing ideas.'
¶
Carol Christ told me that the events of the past academic year hadn't changed her faith in the First Amendment, but that they had made her wonder how an eighteenth-century text should be interpreted in the twenty-first century. 'Speech is fundamentally different in the digital context,' she said. 'I don't think the law, or the country, has even started to catch up with that yet.' The University of California had done everything within its legal power to let Yiannopoulos speak without allowing him to hijack Berkeley's campus. It was a qualified success that came at a steep price, in marred campus morale and in dollars-nearly three million, all told. 'These aren't easy problems,' Brown told me. 'But I don't think it's beyond us to say, on the one hand, that everyone has a right to express their views, and, on the other hand, that a political provocateur may not use a university campus as his personal playground, especially if it bankrupts the university. At some point, when some enormous amount of money has been spent, it has to be possible to say, O.K. Enough.'"

"The bottom line: Political conservatives are attacking academia. The radical defense of free speech has become a 'conservative' thing, since liberal crowds shouting down conservative speakers is the big issue. If conservative students attempted to shout down liberal professors, that would be a normal (in other words 'real') First Amendment?
¶
You can tell that religion is hiding in here somewhere, because the Times piece stresses that these particular free-speech efforts offer, in the eyes of academia, an 'overly paternalistic approach' and are mere 'ammunition in the culture wars.'"

"Wisconsin is not alone. Republican-led state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina have imposed similar policies on public colleges and universities, and bills to establish campus speech guidelines are under consideration in at least seven other legislatures. These efforts, funded in part by big-money Republican donors, are part of a growing and well-organized campaign that has put academia squarely in the cross hairs of the American right.
¶
The spate of new policies shows how conservatives are successfully advancing one of their longstanding goals: to turn the tables in the debate over the First Amendment by casting the left as an enemy of open and free political expression on campuses. It was at schools like Berkeley, after all, that the free speech movement blossomed in the 1960s.
¶
The new efforts raise a question that has only grown more intractable since President Trump took office: When one person's beliefs sound like hate speech to another, how do you ensure a more civil political debate?
¶
What conservatives see as a necessary corrective to decades of political imbalance in higher education, liberals and some college administrators see as an overly paternalistic approach to a problem that is being used as ammunition in the culture wars."

"Instead of trying to restrict free speech to tiny areas, I suggest college and university leaders — in the spirit of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement — start with the presumption of intellectual freedom across the campus."

"By the 1960s, fueled by the free speech movement across the bay at Berkeley, major concerns about the Stanford administration suppressing speech began to emerge.
¶
'When I first arrived in 1966, the administration was trying to limit the activities of recognized student organizations,' said Lenny Siegel, former leader of Stanford's Students for a Democratic Society and current Mountain View Mayor.
¶
As far as Siegel remembers, the administration attempted to dictate which groups could have permits to hold rallies, as well as which could have a desk in the ASSU space. Generally speaking, however, publicly challenging such attempts was enough to thwart them."

"The blurring of lines between social and political resistance can be seen in the Free Speech Movement, says Sean Burns, who teaches a course at Berkeley on 'Social Movements, Urban History, and the Politics of Memory.' Beyond winning the right to organize around off-campus political causes, he says, 'perhaps the most significant legacy' of the FSM was far-reaching and foundational, 'the rethinking of what education should and could be.'"

"In 1976 (the Bicentennial of the American Revolution) a talented team of volunteer artists painted over the side of what is now Amoeba Records on Berkeley's Haste Street. Osha Neumann, the Berkeley lawyer-activist-artist who conceived and executed the mural, believed that Berkeley deserved a memorial to its own revolution-beginning 1964 with the Free Speech Movement and continuing through the creation of People's Park.
¶
'A People's History of Telegraph Avenue' (popularly known as the "People's Park Mural") has survived, graffiti-free for 42 years but the mural now is badly in need of repainting. Without a proper restoration, it could soon be lost forever.
¶
A fund-raising campaign has been initiated to save the mural. Tax-deductible donations can be sent to this Indiegogo account
¶
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-the-people-s-park-mural/x/3220044#/ and checks can be mailed to: Green Cities Fund, Inc., 725 Washington St., Ste. 300, Oakland, CA 94607. (Memo line on the check: 'People's Park mural.')"

"LC: I went to the State University of New York in Fredonia for my first year of college. I thought I wanted to leave New York City but it was too isolated for me upstate. The free speech movement in Berkeley was just then hitting the news--it was 1964 and 1965. I realized that I wanted to be in a metropolitan area where activism was happening so I transferred to New York University (NYU)."

"The commission also suggested that Berkeley, along with the Board of Regents of the University of California system, solicit state lawmakers to help fund efforts to protect free speech on the campus, given its status as the birthplace of the free-speech movement.
¶
'The Berkeley campus is a lightning rod for free-speech issues,' the report says, 'and therefore carries the burden of protecting the First Amendment for the State of California and for public universities across the nation.'
¶
In a public email, [Chancellor Carol] Christ said she supported the commission’s findings. It’s unclear, though, how many will be put into effect. 'I will work with my leadership team to determine what is feasible for us to carry forward over the course of the next weeks and months,' she wrote."

"In March of 1985, Pritchett and other activists decided to start a sit-in. They hauled their sleeping bags to Sproul Hall and renamed the plaza 'Biko Plaza' in honor of slain South African activist Steve Biko.
¶
It wasn't just your average protest. Day after day, night after night, students were attracted to the Sproul steps. Soon there were thousands of attendees and hundreds camping out, a level of activity the campus hadn't seen since the '60s. It had only been a week. The sustained growth was promising.
¶
Police attempted to crack down, arresting 158 protestors. In response, 10,000 students boycotted classes, and celebrities, from Kurt Vonnegut to Alice Walker to the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio, came to Berkeley to show their support. The protest had become a movement. Anti-apartheid hero Bishop Desmond Tutu visited the Greek Theatre on campus that spring:
¶
As God looks down on you today, he's saying, hey, hey, have you seen my children in Berkeley? Eh? Don't you think that they're something else?"

"To those of us who know that Western leftists were often at the forefront of struggles for greater political and cultural freedom in the 20th century -- whether they were agitating against McCarthyite censorship of communist ideas, or setting up the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s, or arguing against the idea that 'video nasties' warped minds and therefore should be banned -- it feels tragic that many leftists now agitate for the blacklisting or destruction of 'offensive' ideas and culture.
¶
When they call for far-right marches or speakers to be banned, leftists repeat the censoriousness of McCarthyism. (Indeed, the House Un-American Activities started as a purge of fascism from America before moving on to communism.) When some on the left fret that lads' mags or 'sexist' songs like 'Blurred Lines' or old books that contain the word nigger will unleash readers' and viewers' base instincts and potentially destabilise society, they echo the stiff, Christian censorship radicals once opposed. When leftists brand as 'phobic' -- that is, irrational -- anyone who thinks a man cannot become a woman, they repeat the terrible thing that was once done to them: they brand those who hold views they find difficult or offensive as 'ill', unstable, a threat to society."

"The University of California -- birthplace of the Free Speech Movement -- launched the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement to support and advance research, education and advocacy on these challenging issues.
¶
In February, the center announced its first 10 fellows. These scholars, students and analysts from across the country are spending a year researching timely, vital First Amendment topics. Their work will include developing tools, analyzing data and deriving lessons from history. Each will reside for a week at one of the 10 UC campuses to engage with students, faculty, administrators and community members."

"In what some would later describe as a blueprint for subsequent campus demonstrations, protests erupted at UC Berkeley after student groups were told they could no longer use a plaza for "off campus" political action. On Oct. 1, 1964, a crowd of students gathered around a police car to prevent the arrest of an activist who had defied the policy.
¶
The movement culminated with a sit-in at the university's main administration building on Dec. 2 that saw hundreds of protesters arrested.
¶
In the end, the Free Speech Movement succeeded in overturning the campus ban on promoting off-campus movements. Many also credited the movement with introducing to college campuses civil disobedience tactics widely employed in connection with the civil rights movement."

"Back on January 25, a news crew from Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based global news organization, visited the Berkeley campus to film interviews for a program on the collision of political extremism and 'free speech.'
¶
The 30-minute Faultline documentary has just been released. (You can watch the complete broadcast below.) ¶
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNfTPG7nVrg&feature=youtu.be
¶
In addition to resurrecting film clips of Berkeley's historic Free Speech Movement, the film crew also interviewed three FSM vets--Anita Medal, Steve Lustig, and yours truly. The final result, as the title reveals, is less about philosophical debates over the First Amendment and more about the tactics of the Black Bloc anarchists that comprise the anti-fascist (Antifa) clique.
¶
One surprising take-away from the up-close-and-personal interviews with protagonists on both sides of the Great Trump Split, is how reasonable the Alt-Right reps sound when contrasted to members of Antifa."

"At almost all these events, speakers proclaimed themselves present at the continuation or initiation of a movement. But sustained movements must be organized. These were, like the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, political spasms. Perhaps not theater as farce -- but theater at most. At best, some presaged something later, bigger and effective."

"In retrospect, Van Buren was an extraordinary place then, with students like inventor Ray Kurzweil, political activist Mario Savio and Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth within a few years of one another. Everyone helped each other and set a level of ambition that was quite unusual. We were strivers: We wanted to improve ourselves and the world."

"Battles over campus free speech have been continuous throughout American history. The student free speech movement began at the University of California Berkeley in 1964. Faculty members stopped students from distributing flyers and spreading information about the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Student Jack Weinberg was arrested for distributing civil rights literature. In protest, other students at the site sat on the road, blocking the police car with Weinberg for 32 hours. The confrontation proved too much for the university, and the faculty voted to end all restrictions on political activity. One of the first student movements proved victorious." [Ed. note: it was the Administration not Faculty which stopped students from distributing flyers.]

"Solidarity of civil disobedience that united the destiny of black and white people appeared in the Bay Area in 1964. Mario Savio, a young student of the University of California at Berkeley, upon returning from his volunteer in Mississippi Freedom Summer saw the similar struggle on the campus in the administration's ban on students' political activities and their effort to regulate the content of speech. Inspired by the courage of black people fighting for first class citizenship, students who had been treated as raw materials that are to be made into products, began pushing the boundaries of free speech.
¶
With sit-ins, picket lines and weeks of demonstrations, white middle class youth exercised speech that had consequences to rebel against bureaucracy and the university's crackdown on students who were participating in the civil rights movement. In his impassioned speech, Savio liberated human emotions that have been oppressed by the dictatorship of reason. The iconic image of this freedom's orator atop the police car ignited radical politics, giving birth to the free speech movement (FSM) that put the city of Berkeley at the center of world's attention."

"Inspired by his family of Russian immigrants and Holocaust survivors, Dr. Parker fought for human rights throughout his life. At the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, he was one of only two faculty members who supported then-student Bernie Sanders' successful attempt to desegregate student housing in 1962. Dr. Parker continued to defy segregation in the 1960s with the Freedom Riders. At Berkeley, he became a passionate participant in the Free Speech Movement. Dr. Parker counted Mario Savio as a personal friend."

"The chancellors and presidents of UC Berkeley have always dealt with passionate protesters. It is they who ultimately face the the trial of decision-making when politics risk disrupting their institution's academic purpose.
¶
Whether in reaction to Mario Savio's demands, the ban on affirmative action or the fiery Milo Yiannopoulos protests last spring, chancellors continually find themselves caught between the rock of student opinion and the hard requirements of their job description." [Ed note: Savio was among the leaders of the FSM. The demands were hardly his, alone.]

"1960s
¶
It's not a list about UC Berkeley without a mention of the Free Speech Movement. In 1964, students protested a ban on campus activities, which led to protests over the Vietnam War, the 'Free Huey' movement and protests in People's Park throughout the decade. This momentum continues into present day, making UC Berkeley one of the most politically notorious schools ever." ¶
https://calisphere.org/exhibitions/43/the-free-speech-movement/

"The tour introduces visitors to events such as the Free Speech Movement; the building of, and riots at, People's Park; the civil rights shop-ins at Lucky's Supermarket; a landmark related to the Japanese internment; milestones in the disability rights movement; as well as some iconic book stores and theaters. On every corner of Telegraph Avenue, it seems, history rubs shoulders with characters and businesses that are still very much alive today.
¶....¶
There are 11 stops on the walking tour, each one featuring an audio interview with a Berkeley resident who was an eyewitness at the event. It's a kind of living history project, one that can be enjoyed and re-experienced on city streets rather than at a historical park. Jack Radey talks about the Free Speech Movement; Osha Newman talks about People's Park; Doris Moskowitz talks about her father, Moe Moskowitz, who owned Moe's Books; and Steve Wasserman remembers foreign cinema and literary culture on Telegraph in the 1950s and 60s.
¶....¶
[Stuart] Baker added that a lot of Europeans come to Telegraph because they have heard about 'the mystique of Telegraph, and they want to see it for themselves. I hear French people all the time, standing in front of the mural by the Amoeba, trying to tell their kids: 'This was the start of the 60s. In Paris we had the Sorbonne, and in the US they had Berkeley.''"

"We live in area where student activism causes change.
¶
The Free Speech Movement began with a yearlong protest at UC Berkeley led by Mario Savio after students were barred from fundraising and distributing political flyers on campus. The university eventually relented, but student-led civil disobedience quickly spread to college campuses throughout the country in the '60s, coalescing into protests of the Vietnam War.
¶
Tuition for UC and California State University students remained frozen from 2011 to 2016 because Gov. Jerry Brown listened to student protesters.
¶
Merritt College students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale met in 1962 and four years later formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. As their movement grew, the Panthers' foot soldiers concentrated on building free breakfast programs.
¶
The breakfast program spread to cities across the country and at its height fed 10,000 children grits, eggs and toast each morning before school. The student activists' hard work became the blueprint for today's federal school breakfast program.
¶
Student-led social change doesn't just happen on college campuses. It's also happening in high school hallways."

"The tour has 11 stops with titles like 'the Free Speech Movement' and 'Satanic Verses and Cody's Books,' and it is narrated by people who participated in the avenue's history. Among them is Osha Neumann, a lawyer and painter of the People's Mural, which depicts social movements of the 1960s. This includes Bloody Thursday, a 1969 clash between students and police officers over the park that led to the death of a man named James Rector."

"The FSM began in the context of a militant civil rights fight against Bay Area businesses that were discriminating against Black workers. The UC Berkeley administration, responding to pressure from the business community and politicians, ramped up already-severe restrictions on student political organizing. Civil rights activists organized a coalition of groups called the Free Speech Movement in response and led thousands of students in militant direct actions to force the administration to allow free speech on campus. Right-wing forces on campus -- including students, faculty, and administration -- consistently opposed the FSM's principles and tactics and sought to repress the movement."

"The 11 stops and titles include: the Free Speech Movement; Street Artists; Computer Memory at Leopold's Records; Japanese American Internment and the First Congregational Church; Foreign Cinema and Literary Culture; and People's Park Mural and the Riots of 1969.
¶
One stop, 'Race, Discrimination and the Shop,' narrated by Anita Medal, tells the story of Lucky's supermarket, a target of civil rights demonstrations until 1965 because of its anti-black hiring practices.
¶
She describes being there as CORE shoppers filled their baskets to the top, took them to the checkout and then refused to pay. At the time, she felt this was rude and disruptive but when she learned that three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi had disappeared and were found dead, her feelings changed.
¶
'What I saw at Lucky's I questioned and was uncomfortable with. I didn't understand how dire it was,' she said. 'Then I realized what it takes to create change, that was the whole point of it, to educate people and make them aware of how much discrimination and prejudice existed just under our noses and not just in the South.'"

"Sam Farber is a professor emeritus of political science at the City University of New York. He was a graduate student in the department of sociology at UC Berkeley from 1963 to 1969, where he obtained his doctorate. He was active in the Free Speech Movement and the UC Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.
¶
He, along with Joel Geier and Hal Draper, founded the Independent Socialist Club in 1964, which played a key role in organizing the Free Speech Movement."

"Of course, once upon a time, it was the Left that led the battle for freedom of speech and expression, a tradition that can be traced all the way back to the origins of the Left itself in what Jonathan Israel calls the 'radical Enlightenment' and the writings of Condorcet, d'Holbach, Diderot and heterodox Jew, Baruch Spinoza.
¶
It was the radical Enlightenment that played an instrumental role in challenging an ancien regime grounded in tradition, faith and authority which culminated in the revolutionary tradition that inspired among others the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. Invoking this tradition of radical Enlightenment, the Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, was born in the 1964-65 term on the campus of UC Berkeley. The long-standing FSM agitated for the lifting of restrictions on free speech and for academic freedom for students."

"All successful movements have a moment when they gather momentum. The great push for civil rights acquired its force thanks to Rosa Parks and the buses of Montgomery. The Free Speech Movement helped create the climate for mass opposition to the Vietnam War.
¶
It's possible that the attack in Parkland, Fla., will be that defining moment for the movement against rampant gun violence in the United States.
¶
The courageous students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who lost 17 of their classmates and school staffers allegedly to a 19-year-old with an assault rifle, have set in motion a reaction that goes beyond politics."

[Robert Scheer] "You, as I say, in terms of career you were at Berkeley and you got involved in the Free Speech Movement, the Civil Rights Movement. And then in this campaign, and the Vietnam Day Committee, and then my own campaign, which was basically against the war and also working on poverty, to eradicate poverty in Oakland, which we failed on."

"Bardacke remembers: ... 'This was the time that Lenny Glaser was giving his talks at Bancroft and Telegraph. As the students left Madam Nhu's speech, Lenny, the practiced outdoor orator, was standing on the ledge above the steps delivering his own speech, admonishing the students for applauding. Here's the part I remember. 'You failed today. You failed a test in politics. And when you fail in politics it isn't like failing in school. It matters. And you will pay. You will pay in the jungles of Vietnam, in the pampas of Argentina, in the mountains of Nicaragua. When you fail in politics, you pay in blood.' It was magnificent. He held the attention of so many students, that the street across from Harmon was blocked. After a while the cops came. Made their way slowly through the crowd in a cop car with the siren blaring. The arrested Lenny. Put him in the car. Immediately some one sat down in front of the car, and was followed by many others. Lenny was in the back seat, delighted. 'Oh you are in trouble now,' he told the cops. For a while it was stand off. Finally, the confused cops let Lenny go, and were permitted to drive off. It was dress rehearsal for Jack Weinberg. and the FSM.'"

"In 1964, University of California student Mario Savio delivered powerful words during a free speech movement. Protesting the university prohibition on political activity, Savio unleashed on the system. 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
¶
It is time for students to put their bodies upon the gears of the broken machine that lets people get their hands so easily on weapons of mass destruction.
¶
The nation is at an important crossroads after Parkland and much of what happens next will depend on students. They must remain the heart of this campaign. Their words are the strongest antidote to the money and lobbyists of the NRA. The NRA's resistance will be immense, but it is not insurmountable.
¶
Young Americans have shown in other moments of history that their voice can matter. Indeed, it can change the course of the nation. Now we will see if America's young people can do so again with the crisis of guns that afflicts our nation."

'The so-called 'Free Speech Movement' was never truly about free speech -- it was always about the causes of those involved. To be sure, the goals for which the Free Speechers fought were largely worthy and good."

"Gabriela [Taylor] sat in Sproul Hall with her peers for hours and was among the protesters who were arrested. She remembers being the last to be 'dragged down the hall to the booking room, by my collar,' where a reporter asked her, 'Since you are the last of 801 students arrested, what would you like to say?'
¶
'This is only the beginning. The fight for freedom will continue,' was Gabriela's immediate response. Her quote ran in newspapers all across the country-prompting her husband's wealthy grandmother to disinherit him when she caught wind of it. Her husband, Kit Sims Taylor '64, felt this blow 'wasn't a big deal. We couldn't care less. We lived simply and envisioned a bright future ahead.'"

"'ALT RIGHT' AND neo-Nazi organizers -- where there is significant overlap -- make no secret of the rhetorical Trojan horse they use to infiltrate campus discourse. When white supremacist groups like the white nationalists of the National Policy Institute, along with Identity Evropa, began targeting college campuses in the spring of 2016, they were explicit in their cooption of the liberal lexicon of 'safe spaces' and free speech protections.
¶
'Here it is, the birth of the free speech movement,' pronounced far-right group Red Ice in May 2016, at a small rally at the University of Berkeley, California. It was a potent combination: a cynical adoption of traditional liberal and leftist speech mixed with a genuine desire to be able spread ideologies of hate in public without interference. Liberal centrists swallowed it whole.
¶
Wittingly or not, it was a devilish sleight of hand: neo-fascists relying on American liberalism's unmatched fetishization of protected speech in order to claim that the real fascists are in fact the ones who would see them silenced."

"Outside his DOPE ERA clothing shop (During Oppression People Evolve, Everyone Rises Above) in North Oakland, Mistah F.A.B. (aka Stanley Cox) muses about whether the Warriors are, in fact, the most politically progressive team ever. He's a rap artist and community activist who once did a freestyle rap about the Warriors that foreclosed that option to anyone who has thought about trying it since. Now he recalls Smith and Carlos and cites the Clippers wearing their warm-up jerseys reversed to protest racist remarks by then-team owner Donald Sterling in 2014. But 'I can't even think of a team in contention for social relevance,' he says, 'in the way the Warriors are demonstrating now.'
¶
Some of that stems from Oakland itself. For more than half a century, Oakland and the Bay Area have been synonymous with the black consciousness movement, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. They've welcomed the Free Speech Movement, anti-war protests and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. The cities by the bay have been an incubator for gay rights, anti-fascism and Black Lives Matter."

"He obtained his BSW/MSW (1957/1959) in social work from University of California-Berkeley, participating in the Free Speech Movement, a precursor to the national anti-war movement. He earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 1963."

"As America's military presence grew, so did the parallel battle for peace. It had been growing since the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Johnson's subsequent call for the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. Civil rights groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Free Speech Movement had held teach-ins and marched in Washington and elsewhere. Young men publicly burned their draft cards. The New Left dubbed the United States 'Amerika,' and the underground press disseminated antiwar information through their own news services." [Ed note: UCB Teach-Ins were post-FSM, although many who had participated in the FSM were involved.]

"'Sometimes your brand is your curse,' says political scientist Henry Brady, dean of Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, noting that the university is 'the home of the Free Speech Movement'. Originating on the left during the 1960s civil rights era and continuing during protests against the Vietnam War, the movement pressured university administrators to lift the ban on on-campus political activity." [Ed note: the Berkeley FSM was resoved in December 1964 with a vote of the Faculty Senate. The FSM itself was dissolved in April 1965, and lasted seven months.]

"There appears to be a consensus among UC Berkeley law professors that despite his offensive views, alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous had a legal right to speak on campus last September. And the UC administration has taken a hard and fast stance when it comes to speech, saying that any suppression of it would go against the university's official mission-to be a center for higher learning and advancing that higher learning.
¶
'We would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous,' writes Chancellor Carol Christ in a letter to the campus community. 'Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.'"

"While at Cal and after, Simon was active in the Free Speech Movement and in the famous struggle to liberate Berkeley's People's Park. Of this time, he wrote 'I was a newcomer to the Bay Area, having arrived in Berkeley in September 1964 in time to sit down in the crowd on Sproul Plaza surrounding the police car which was holding Jack Weinberg prisoner in the back seat in the first act of what would become the Free Speech Movement.'"

"The Pentagon Papers -- officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force -- is an encyclopedia of outrageous decisions and acts, what Ellsberg once described as 'evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over 23 years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder.' Ellsberg didn't stop the war, but he did assert our right, and obligation, to challenge absolute power. That may be why the filmmakers -- the script is by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer -- slip in a bit from a speech that Mario Savio delivered two years before The Post opens and which memorably asserts: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part!'"

As [Ashley] Jones tells it, the pivotal point came in 1964. "When I first saw Mario Savio standing on top of a cop car with a megaphone in Berkeley, that was it! It opened me up. I realized I'd been living too comfortably."

"That rich history is captured in a new digital timeline, created in honor of UC’s 150th anniversary. It shows how far the university has come since its earliest days, and details its role in pivotal moments like World War II, the Free Speech Movement and the birth of the biotech industry"

"More recently in 2014, the chancellor at Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, sent an email message to the university community in which he attempted to combine the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a request for civility.
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In his message, Dirks stated that 'we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas.'
¶
In response, the Board of Directors of the Free Speech Movement Archives and the 50th Anniversary Organizing Committee sent a letter to Dirks stating that he seemed to have missed the point of the Free Speech Movement and reminded the chancellor: 'The struggle of the FSM was all about the right to political advocacy on campus.'"

"The first activities of a new campus left were often taken in solidarity with the civil rights struggle, and later against the Vietnam War. But these connected with a deeper sense of alienation and discontent--something Mario Savio, a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, gave expression to in a 1964 speech:
¶
There's a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.
¶
Savio crystallized a sentiment that existed in the newly expanding university systems of countries around the world. But as the 1960s continued, it was opposition to the expanding U.S. war on Vietnam that galvanized the student radicalization--especially in the U.S., but also in other countries."

"Fast-forwarding to 2017, in The Post, Spielberg could be accused of co-opting the activism and words of several sources. For instance, in the scene in which a group of demonstrators are assembled outside a park, a male voice heard over a megaphone recites a famous speech, nicknamed the 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech delivered by the late activist Mario Savio, an early member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In the film, the demonstration takes place in 1971, in Washington, DC. Savio, however, gave the speech at Berkeley University in December, 1964. It’s the kind of co-option that Marcuse and the students were fearful about, though it can be argued that Spielberg is essentially on the same side as Savio, and after the same ends."

"But if Rolling Stone was a creature of the San Francisco counterculture, its success can also be traced to its Berkeley roots. According to Hagan, Wenner's years at Cal had a profound effect on the magazine's origins and development. Early contributors and editors-including Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, and Jon Carroll-were Cal alumni, and their stances on politics, drugs, and music were staples in the magazine's unique editorial formula.
¶
'The Berkeley network was central to the development of Rolling Stone,' Hagan said.
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That network began to take shape after Wenner enrolled at Cal in 1963. An English major and political science minor, he was also an editor for SLATE, the student political party that helped launch the Free Speech Movement (FSM). In his spare time, Wenner worked at the NBC radio affiliate KNBR, where he eventually covered the Berkeley campus. He was reporting from the Greek Theatre in December 1964 when police hauled off FSM leader Mario Savio after he tried to respond to UC President Clark Kerr's address. An AP photograph shows Wenner in a trench coat, microphone in hand, only yards behind the apprehended Savio."
¶....¶
"Berkeley's influence on Marcus, who grew up on the peninsula, ran even deeper. An American Studies seminar taught by Michael Rogin and Larzer Ziff fired his imagination. Rogin was open, charismatic, and not much older than the students; Ziff was more rigorous but was equally inspiring. The class met in a library seminar room, which Marcus described as 'the most marvelous place imaginable.' He and his classmates completed their homework there, often staying past midnight to discuss American history, politics, and culture. Afterward, they used a rope to rappel down from the third floor of the closed library. It was 'an atmosphere of great intellectual intensity,' Marcus recalled. 'The questions were real, part of everyday life.'
¶
Marcus saw strong and direct links between that course and the Free Speech Movement. 'Everything we were doing in that seminar was playing out in public,' he said. After one class, he and his fellow students wandered down to Sproul Plaza, where they saw a police car surrounded by hundreds of students. Jack Weinberg, arrested for violating campus restrictions on political activism, sat handcuffed in the back seat. Beginning with Savio, speakers mounted the car and argued the merits of those policies. The entire experience, Marcus said, 'made knowledge concrete, real, open, and open-ended.' It also shaped his life and his work.
¶
'The Free Speech Movement had an enormous effect on everyone and in many ways,' Marcus said. 'We measured ourselves against it and its values. Rolling Stone wouldn't have happened without the Free Speech Movement. Everything that I had learned at Berkeley, that I had learned to care about, there was room for that at Rolling Stone.'"

"Coming to My Senses follows Waters's path from her childhood in New Jersey and Michigan to Southern California to the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the Sixties. Though Waters describes her thinking back then as 'romantic and simplistic' and found herself easily intimidated by threats of arrest from the police, the movement left its mark and awakened a revolutionary spirit within her, as she found herself moved by Mario Savio and the impact of nonviolent courses of action. She writes, 'When the dominant culture behaves immorally, the way the United States was about the war, civil rights, and freedom of public expression, you begin to feel betrayed.'"

"Campuses have a long history of playing focal point to freedom of expression debates of all kinds. In December 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, began protesting political speech restrictions on campus. The demonstrations continued for months, solidifying UC Berkeley's symbolic status as the nucleus of the free speech movement. In the years since, the campus's Sproul Plaza and Mario Savio Steps have been marched on, sat upon and otherwise occupied by an assortment of protests."

"The Pentagon Papers -- officially titled 'Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force' -- is an encyclopedia of outrageous decisions and acts, what Mr. Ellsberg once described as 'evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder.' Mr. Ellsberg didn't stop the war, but he did assert our right, and obligation, to challenge absolute power. That may be why the filmmakers -- the script is by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer -- slip in a bit from a speech that Mario Savio delivered two years before 'The Post' opens and which memorably asserts: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part!'"

"These incidents have marred UC Berkeley's former reputation for being a bastion of free speech. The same campus that once stood witness to the birth of the Free Speech Movement 50 years ago is now under the microscope for restricting speech. The university claims 'free speech is who we are,' but it appears that the 'we' has become more selective."

"As Jews, we generally take great pride in the support we have shown for civil rights and free speech. The 1964 sit-in of thousands of students in UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall, which catapulted the free speech movement into the headlines, included a Hanukkah service*. We still talk about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel praying with his legs in 1965 as he marched with Dr. King in Selma. Even as recently as 1995, the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) proudly announced its position in defense of the first Amendment, 'we cherish these protections, not only because they are the hallmark of true freedom, but because we also know that the vibrant political discussion they foster strengthens our nation.' We like to think of ourselves as long time champions for justice and equality. And so, we should be appalled at the nomination of Kenneth Marcus for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education."
* https://www.thenation.com/article/free-speech-movement/

"My own experience at Berkeley is not only fraught with examples of free speech suppression but utterly inconsistent with what I thought college in general, and Berkeley in particular, should be all about. Berkeley captured my interest during the college admissions process because a particular moment in the school's history resonated with me: the image of Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement speaking up courageously for First Amendment rights on campuses. The struggle and eventual success of this movement is, in my mind, everything college should be about. Students both on the right and left sacrificed for one another's right to be heard; they sacrificed for an enriched campus discourse, even if they completely disagreed with some of the messages they fought for."

"But 'The Graduate' is also the story of Berkeley, of the city whose university Elaine attends and of the place where Benjamin, fueled by a moment of startling clarity, flings himself down Telegraph Avenue and past Moe's Books in pursuit of the bus she rides.
¶
That Berkeley -- which three years before rose to national prominence for the free speech protests -- was chosen as a setting simply re-reflects the dogged, determined effort on the part of the film to remain contemporary.
¶
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in January 1967 -- nearly a year before the film's release -- Nichols, reportedly underwhelmed by the stereotypical facade of sunny Californian settings, commented on his resolve to 'show the place as it really is.'
¶
That place, according to historian W. J. Rorabaugh, was undergoing a period of strident instability as political and cultural vanguards were supplanted by insurgency and the city itself struggled to define what it wanted to be.
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The conservative factions that had governed administrations from city hall to the state assembly were besieged and, in some instances, successfully succeeded by leftist powers of various radical persuasions. Around the university and the Bay Area, the Beat Generation boomed their disdain for conventional living. Activists like Jack Weinberg -- locked inside a police car for hours after his arrest while students surged forward to stand on its roof -- found their voices.
¶
So in many ways, Berkeley shared in Benjamin's struggles and bereftness, where the grating divide between generations and values yawned wide and gaping. 'You're not one of those agitators?' asks Benjamin's landlord in Berkeley, squinting at the young protagonist suspiciously when he attempts to rent a room. 'Those outside agitators? I hate that. I won't stand for it.'"

"Country Joe & the Fish came about as part political device, part necessity and part entertainment. Formed as a duo in 1965 by 'Country' Joe McDonald and guitarist Barry 'The Fish' Melton, the two became regulars on the Bay Area coffeehouse circuit, often performing with local jug band musicians. Both McDonald and Melton were heavily involved in anti-war protests and the Free Speech Movement, particularly McDonald, who published an underground journal, Rag Baby."

"The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of California, Berkeley, is mounting a campaign against the university's efforts to establish police censorship over student groups. UC Berkeley's new policy, known as the Major Events Policy, subjects all student group meetings on campus to an eight-week process of police review and requires that clubs pay for any police presence required by the administration.¶
....¶
The Berkeley IYSSE officially launched its campaign against police censorship with a meeting on Thursday November 30, attended by 25 people including representatives of several student clubs. Joseph Santolan spoke for the IYSSE, detailing the anti-democratic impact of the new policy. He outlined the history of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s and how students fought the university and police for the right to campaign on campus against the oppression of African Americans."

"The danger intrinsic in parrhesia's offensiveness to the powers-that-be-be they monarchs like Alexander or the democratic majority-fascinated Michel Foucault, who made it the subject of a series of lectures at Berkeley (home of the original campus Free Speech Movement) in the 1980s. Foucault noticed that the practice of parrhesia necessarily entailed an asymmetry of power, hence a 'contract' between the audience (whether one or many), who pledged to tolerate any offense, and the speaker, who agreed to tell them the truth and risk the consequences.¶
....¶
Recognizing the ancient ideas at work in these modern arguments puts those of us committed to America's parrhesiastic tradition of speaking truth to power in a better position to defend it. It suggests that to defeat the modern proponents of isegoria-and remind the modern parrhesiastes what they are fighting for-one must go beyond the First Amendment to the other, orienting principle of American democracy behind it, namely equality. After all, the genius of the First Amendment lies in bringing isegoria and parrhesia together, by securing the equal right and liberty of citizens not simply to 'exercise their reason' but to speak their minds. It does so because the alternative is to allow the powers-that-happen-to-be to grant that liberty as a license to some individuals while denying it to others."

"What, though, can we say to students and faculty who are not convinced by all of this? I point to the dangers of censorship, such as during the McCarthy era when faculty were fired and students expelled just for being suspected of supporting communism. I simply don't trust campus officials to have the power to decide what speech should be allowed and what should be prohibited. The only way that our speech will be protected is to safeguard the speech that we detest."

"'Free speech has been adopted by the alt-right as one of its strategies to construct a narrative about universities that is extremely useful for their political goals,' Professor Christ said of US developments in her speech to the conference, hosted by Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), marking its 60th anniversary.
¶
Mr Yiannopoulos' Free Speech Week 'was meant to really provoke the university into cancelling it' and thus to 'support the narrative that he's trying to create', Professor Christ said. She added: 'Well, we called his bluff and finally…Milo's free speech movement collapsed with its own weight.'
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Professor Christ said it was 'extraordinarily important for universities' to 'support free speech'. She added: 'Not supporting free speech plays into a narrative of the far-right to discredit universities. So it's just extraordinarily important that we not play that part in that narrative.'
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The 'best answer to hateful speech is more speech,' she said."

"Civil rights attorney Ann Fagan Ginger will discuss 'The Civil Rights of the Homeless' at The Berkeley-East Bay Gray Panthers meeting at 1:30 p.m. Nov. 22 at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave.
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The talk will be followed by music and a holiday party.
¶
Ginger is a lawyer, teacher, writer, and political activist, and the founder and executive director emerita of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute and was legal counsel for students at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.
¶
'She is an expert in human rights law and peace law under the regulations of the Unites Nations, and has argued an won before the U.S. Supreme Court,' according to an event announcement."

"But Rolling Stone's identity can also be traced to two other sources: Berkeley's culture of dissent and Ramparts magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker.
¶
The Berkeley influence was strong and direct. The magazine's early staff writers were steeped in Berkeley's ardent campus activism, and their views on politics, drugs and music informed the magazine's coverage. Wenner wrote a music column for the student newspaper and covered the free speech movement for a local radio station. Even more significant for Wenner, perhaps, was the example of Gleason, who combined an impressive body of music criticism with public support for student activists. Wenner spent hours at Gleason's Berkeley home, soaking up his insights on music and journalism."

"No such excuse exists, of course, at UC Berkeley, where, as your admissions tour guide was surely eager to tell you, the 1964-65 Free Speech Movement -- a widespread series of protests aimed at the administration's decision to ban on-campus political activities -- began. It's where the Third World Liberation Front organized a strike in 1969 leading to the creation of the campus's ethnic studies department, where thousands of students gathered over the course of the many anti-Vietnam War rallies held in Sproul Plaza. It's where just last month the eyes of America turned as the looming specter of the politically charged Free Speech Week hung over campus in the wake of the 2016 campus riots related to Yiannopoulos and Trump."

"On this episode of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, we revisit the events surrounding the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement to see if the university's storied past can teach us anything about today's debates." [Ed note: BIG Jack Weinberg interview. Minutes 13 to 45 are about FSM.]

"Stories From the Edge, which touches only briefly on [Jann] Wenner's own background, tells a much different story than Sticky Fingers. Gibney and Foster make a meal of his involvement in the Berkeley student protests of 1964 -- a Berkeley student himself, Wenner was a stringer for NBC and can be seen in the background of an iconic photo of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio being yanked off the steps of the university's Greek Theater. But, echoing Savio's famed 'bodies upon the gears' speech, Hagan writes that Wenner's 'true convictions lay with the 'apparatus' of NBC News' and reports that when police started to beat and arrest protesters at a sit-in at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel, Wenner ran away."

"[Joan Wallach] Scott: Yes, and there's actually a wonderful quote from Stanley Fish, who is sometimes very polemical and with whom I don't always agree. He writes, 'Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value; completeness of speech is an academic value; relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.' Freedom of speech is not about that. Freedom of speech is about expressing your opinion, however bad or good, however right or wrong, and being able to defend it and argue it and be argued with about it in public forums. But that's not what academic freedom is about. That's not what the classroom is about. I would have a hard time banning even Richard Spencer [founder of the white nationalist movement] from speaking on a university campus, however hateful and dangerous I find his ideas."

[Erwin Chemerinsky] "I don't want to overgeneralize, but we saw in our students, I see already on this campus, is this is the first generation from a young age to be taught that bullying is wrong. They've internalized the message. It's laudable; they want to create an inclusive learning environment for all students. They have remarkable trust in campus authorities to punish the speech that they don't like, but allow the speech that they do like. And for them, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests, were as long ago as World War I was for you or me."

"Born in 1942 in Hamburg, [photographer Ilka] Hartmann grew up and came of age when the country was divided between East and West and a wall ran through Berlin. As a young woman, she studied theology and wanted to become a minister in the Lutheran Church. But then she came to New York in 1964, saw a picture in the New York Times of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and moved to California. From then on she attended dozens of demonstrations and rallies, many of them in San Francisco, always with her camera and sometimes with her son, Ole."

"The University of California, where the free speech movement started and students now argue over how far unrestricted expression should go, announced plans Thursday to launch a national center to study 1st Amendment issues and step up education about them.
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'There have been more serious issues about the 1st Amendment on campuses today than perhaps at any time since the free speech movement,' UC President Janet Napolitano said in an interview. 'The students themselves are raising questions about free speech and does it apply to homophobic speech, does it apply to racist speech? We have to consider the student concerns but return to basic principles about what free speech means and how do we better educate students about the extent of the 1st Amendment.'"

"But I know that Berkeley, especially because of its history with the free speech movement of the 1960s, is a unique place for expression. This is why it is so important that the campus did all it could to ensure freedom of speech. It is also why this campus has the chance to be a model for other schools in upholding the principle that all ideas and views can be expressed at colleges and universities."

"This focus on things - often already antiquated things -- weirdly disconnects Evans' photography from the time in which which it was made. His career spanned the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. Yet of those pivotal social and political moments in American history, only the Great Depression is pictured within Walker Evans."

"UC Berkeley has been a battleground for this debate since the mid-1960s, when the Free Speech Movement led to the campus softening its strict regulations on on-campus political discourse, and causing a fundamental shift in how political discourse was conducted on campuses throughout the United States.
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'The Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was crucial in advancing the speech rights of students across the country,' wrote Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky in an editorial for the Daily Californian."

"'You should be able to listen to another point of view, as virulent as it may be,' Biden said, when asked what could be done to 'encourage people to be more accepting of opposing viewpoints.'
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The event, part of a speaker series organized by the University's Center for Political Communication and centered on the theme 'As We Stand, Divided,' aimed to 'explore the many divides that exist in the United States,' according to the CPC's website.
¶
The former VP reminded the crowd that he 'got in trouble' for denouncing the left-wing protests that forced Milo Yiannopoulos from the lectern at U.C. Berkeley in January and then reached even further back, alluding to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s: 'When I was coming up through college and graduate school, free speech was the big issue, but it was the opposite. It was liberals who were shouted down when they spoke.'
¶
Then he dropped his bombshell: '[L]iberals have very short memories. I mean that sincerely.'"

"JANET NAPOLITANO, PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SYSTEM: Yeah, I think it is. And I think we have to do a much better job of educating our young people about what the First Amendment protects, what it means, and how -- once you start restricting speech, you are on a slippery slope. And so we are educators and that should be part of our mission. Because you're absolutely right, we see an increasing number of young people believe that, you know, we should restrict people like, you know, Richard Spencer, or Milo Yiannopoulos, or Ben Shapiro, from speaking at campuses. And we must remind them that in the past it was speakers favoring, say, the civil rights movement, who were sought to be restricted. So, again, education is key."

"[Safiya] Noble added powerful details to the origins of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in the '60s. 'The free speech movement was not just about giving more voice to people in an abstract flattened plain way. It was in fact about raising the visibility of civil rights, of black liberation, of feminism, of anti-war Vietnam movements, of pacifists or making a space and a place for people to speak back to the kinds of values that we wanted in our society because we didn't want to see the kind of violence that stems from white supremacy. The kind of violence that stems from patriarchy. They very things we're talking about right now today in the media.'"

"A loose coalition of 'Resistance' organizers planned the national draft card turn-in. They were inspired by the civil rights movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (during which one of its leaders, Mario Savio, described having to 'put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, and upon the levers' in order to stop the operation of an odious 'machine') and the precedent of resisters such as Muhammad Ali. By risking indictment, they thought that they could put the Johnson administration -- and the war itself -- on trial in court proceedings all over the country."

"After earned a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University in 1958, [Neil Joseph] Smelser began his career that same year as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, where he stayed until his retirement in 1994. He became a full professor in 1962, and during the Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s, Smelser served as a liaison between students and campus administration -- for which he was appointed special assistant for student political activity in 1965.
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'He was a very impressive leader,' said UC Berkeley professor of sociology Claude Fischer on working with Smelser. 'I was taken with his ability to work together with people to find common ground and work over conflicts or disagreement - the constant diplomat.'"

"As Savio famously implored the rioting students of Berkeley in 1964, Alice has 'put her body upon the gears and upon the wheels' of an odious machine. And if she has not entirely stopped it, she has certainly slowed and altered its course. In every city in America and far beyond, farmers' markets abound; organics are widely available; small organic vegetable gardens thrive from inner cities to suburban front lawns to the White House; the Edible Schoolyard Project, founded by Alice and the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1995 as a way 'to create and sustain an organic garden and landscape that is wholly integrated into the school's curriculum, culture, and food program' now exists in 33 countries."

"University administrators, whose job it is to promote harmony and diversity on campus, often find the easiest way to do so is to placate the intolerant fifth. The two groups form an odd alliance. Contentious campus politics have been a constant feature of American life for more than 50 years. But during the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, students at Berkeley demonstrated to win the right to determine who could say what from administrators. Now the opposite is true. Student activists are demanding that administrators interfere with teaching, asking for mandatory ethnic-studies classes, the hiring of non-white or gay faculty and the ability to lodge complaints against professors for biased conduct in the classroom. This hands more power to administrators."

"'Essentially, he brought in a large group of people who, because they signed papers, claimed that they could vote in the election … and then declared the results that I was impeached,' Worden alleged. 'We will not allow the ego of one individual board member to distract the club (from) its overarching goals (of) supporting the Republican Party (and) supporting the Free Speech Movement.'" [Ed note: what Free Speech Movement is that?]

"I have carefully rehearsed this sequence of events, and placed them in the context of the legacy of the Free Speech Movement in order to demonstrate as clearly as possible that the alt-right hijacked the issue of free speech, about which they know nothing, and could care less, as a huge distraction. Their aim seemed to be to attack the university itself, embarrass progressives, and garner as much publicity as they could while essentially engaging in a provocative, hate-filled, racist bluff. As in Boston, when they tried a similar tactic in early summer, their non-events were dwarfed by the hundreds and thousands of people, of all hues, ethnicities, genders and political persuasions, who came out to affirm an anti-racist, pro-immigration, pro-gay free speech agenda.
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In my view this is how to deal with the alt-right and their ilk. Dwarf their events with non-violent mass movements of unprecedented size and inspired coalition.
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I believe we must affirm and protect the First and 14th amendments to the Constitution with everything we have. Under these amendments all the rights we have won, however contested they may be now, from the civil rights laws, to voting rights, to affirmative action, to gay rights, to reproductive rights and many more are under the aegis of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment."

"Waters dedicates the book to the memory of Mario Savio, a leading member of the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65. She delves into that era of Berkeley protest in the book, as well as her early involvement in politics. By opening her own restaurant, Waters writes, she thought she was turning her back on politics. But food became political.
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'I really went back into that place and remembered how important (Savio) was to me at that time,' she says. 'The mentors you have when you're young can really shape your thinking. And I was very lucky to be exposed to that world and particularly to the cooking mentors I learned from.'"

"The Free Speech Movement is the taproot of a tree with many branches. In 1964, Mario Savio, a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley philosophy major, spent the summer registering black voters in Mississippi. When he got back to Berkeley that fall, he led a fight against a policy that prohibited political speech on campus, arguing that a public university should be as open for political debate and assembly as a public square. The same right was at stake in both Mississippi and Berkeley, Savio said: 'the right to participate as citizens in a democratic society.' After the police arrested nearly eight hundred protesters at a sit-in, the university acceded to the students' demands. The principle of allowing political speech was afterward extended to private universities. Without it, students wouldn't have been able to rally on campus for civil rights or against the war in Vietnam, or for or against anything else then or since." [Ed note: Jill Lepore posits 1964 Berkeley FSM as initial episode in a larger FSM. There were earlier FSMs.]

"The disruption of the ACLU event in Virginia follows the February cancellation of a speech by then-Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California at Berkeley after violence and property damage by his opponents and the shouting down in March of political scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College -- each incident attracting significant national debate, with older left-wing scholars such as Noam Chomsky and some members of Berkeley's pioneering 1960s Free Speech Movement arguing it's wrong to censor others."

"The solutions to these problems, Reich said, include reaching out to those with dissenting opinions on social media, continuing to invest in protecting events such as the now-canceled 'Free Speech Week' and creating a right-to-privatize-information act in order to prevent personal ideas from being distorted.
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Lynne Hollander Savio, a member of UC Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement and the widow of Mario Savio, said the limitations of talking and arguing with 'real people' are gone due to social media.
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'Many groups no longer consider it necessary to speak responsibly,' Hollander Savio said. 'I agree with Reich. … We need to expand the laws that can keep the government or anyone from accessing our information.'"

"But the universities themselves, are all of a sudden, in the United States, much more attentive to issues of political correctness, because of the riots at Berkeley, which was the capital of free speech. The free speech movement happened in the spring before I entered college in 1964, one of the great principles and inspirational stories of my life, Mario Savio's assertion of the supremacy of free thought and free speech. I think that perhaps we might just have turned a corner, but it is going to take a very, very long time for the universities to be reformed." [Ed note: the FSM happened in the fall of 1964.]

"Lynne Hollander Savio was also on the agenda. She is the widow of Mario Savio, a primary architect of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which began in 1964.
¶
Savio expressed concern over recent protests at 'free speech' events at Berkeley that devolved into violence.
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'Despite the provocations, I think students should not rise to the bait,' said Hollander Savio. 'When you attack and try to limit the speech of anyone, even if its very valueless speech, then you run into a wall of opposition that unites everybody against you.'" [ed note: contains brief clip of Lynne speaking]

"The issues of free speech on campus today are very different than at earlier times. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley more than 50 years ago is remembered as the quintessential example of freedom of speech on a campus. It involved students protesting and an administration trying to stop them. But now it is about outside speakers coming onto campus, like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos and Coulter, and outside agitators, like antifa, threatening violence. The campus is the place where this all is happening."

"BERKELEY - Chancellor Carol Christ and Professor of Public Policy and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich are among the luminaries who will speak at 'Free Speech in the Age of Social Media,' an all-day symposium at UC Berkeley on Thursday marking the 53rd anniversary of the birth of the Free Speech Movement.
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'In the past year, the internet has turned its attention to Berkeley's campus debates, and our own community has taken up new media and modes of digital expression to extend and challenge the discussion of free speech,' reads an event description by sponsor Berkeley Center for New Media. 'This is a critical moment; both to the consideration of the intersection of speech, media and digital technologies on the Berkeley Campus and to the Nation as a whole.'"

"This Sunday is the official Free Speech Day in California, to mark the anniversary of the protest that became the genesis of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964.
¶
Lynne Hollander Savio was part of the Free Speech Movement when she was a student at Cal. She’s also the widow of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the movement, and she reflects on the state of free speech on colleges campuses today." [Ed note: 10-minute audio program]

"Berkeley (the school and the city) has been the archetypal hippy-dippy liberal paradise for half a century-and crucially, was home to the original, left-wing Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. All of that has made it the perfect symbol for both antifascist and 'alt-right' political movements, though those groups disagree on whether Berkeley is a bastion of enlightenment or Satan's preferred stomping ground. And now that these groups are taking their grievances offline and onto the mainstream streets of Berkeley, dismissing their activities as simply IRL stagings of Twitter fights trivializes what's really going on. It's a PR war-and one that right-wing provocateurs like Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, who staged her own costly feint of appearing at Free Speech Week are winning. Handily."

"Freedom of speech is one foundational principle of the public university. Academic freedom is another. Since 1964, when the UC Berkeley administration was successfully challenged by the Free Speech Movement to extend First Amendment protections to campus space, the university has had to balance the obligation to allow citizens' speech against the commitment to academic freedom. As a public entity, UC Berkeley must respect the airing of diverse viewpoints; as a higher learning institution, UC Berkeley must protect its autonomy from political interference and harassment. Increasingly, the threat to the campus' autonomy, on which academic freedom depends, derives not from government legislators-as in the era of the FSM, when former UC President Clark Kerr and former UC Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong were faced with adjudicating competing obligations to free speech and academic freedom. Rather, the threat increasingly derives from private interests hostile to the university's mission of research and teaching."

"The battle over free speech in the NFL may be new. But it has uncanny echoes of a 1960s fight at UC-Berkeley waged by a coalition of students from across the political spectrum known as the Free Speech Movement. The F.S.M. started in the fall of 1964 after the Berkeley administration banned all political activity on campus with the goal of repealing the ban. But the energy that drove the movement came from deeper grievances."

"He [Michael Heaney] said Yiannopoulos has more in common with Abbie Hoffman, founder of the short-lived, 1960s-era street-theater group called the Yippies, than with King, Chavez, Parks -- or Mario Savio, whose name today is a symbol of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
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The Sproul Hall steps where Yiannopoulos stood Sunday are named for Savio, who spoke eloquently from those steps against a ban on students' political activities imposed by the UC regents."

"'We are going to be hosting an event come hell or high water tomorrow,' Yiannopoulos said in a live video on Facebook. He made his comments from a hotel room after cancelling a news conference on San Francisco's Treasure Island.
¶
'We will be expressing our constitutional rights to free speech, free expression, on Sproul Plaza, the home of the Free Speech Movement, tomorrow as planned, with or without student help, with or without the cooperation of UC Berkeley itself.'"

"For this reason, I stood up for Milo after the February riot in a piece for the Washington Examiner, vowing to not donate until the home of the Free Speech Movement lives up to its reputation. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to free speech, standing up for deplorable opinions comes with the territory.
¶
Standing up for incompetence, however, is a different matter.
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For the past several weeks, the student group hosting Milo's event, Berkeley Patriot, has continually mishandled the paperwork and public relations required to successfully execute an event of the size they're aspiring to hold. First, they released an outlandish speaker list confirming speakers they apparently had not even contacted, including Charles Murray and 'Google memo' author James Damore. Then, they missed three deadlines from the university to secure the venues they desired."

"Watching this debate attentively but warily are the veterans of the Free Speech Movement, most of whom are now in their 70s.
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Barbara Garson, an author, called Free Speech Week a 'grotesque parody' of the movement she helped lead.
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Kathleen Piper, an artist, said she and other veterans of the movement disagreed with the positions of the right-wing speakers coming to campus. But she said there was a consensus among them that they should be allowed to speak.
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'I think a person needs to hear stuff that they don't agree with,' Ms. Piper said. 'They need the opportunity of discovering that they are not going to melt and go down the nearest drain as a puddle if somebody says something ugly to them. I don't think we should be protected from those experiences.'"

"The 1st Amendment protects the rights of everyone to be heard. But there is a distinction between 'could' and 'should,' between the legal right to do something and doing the right thing. That distinction wasn't lost on Mario Savio, as it seems to be on today's supposed champions of free speech."

"UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said in an email that, 'The university is aware of numerous media reports that the Berkeley Patriot student organization has cancelled events scheduled for next week.'
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But Mogulof said, 'The campus has not heard directly from the students and must, for the time being, proceed with plans to provide for the safety and security of the campus community and any speakers who may still be planning to come to Berkeley.'"

"Free Speech Week has even attempted to draw parallels to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, with Yiannopoulos slated to give the 'Mario Savio Award' -- named after a key figure in the '60s movement -- at the end of the week.
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This isn't completely baseless. Robert Cohen, a historian whose many books include The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, explained in the Nation: 'Savio would almost certainly have disagreed with the faculty and students who urged the administration to ban Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, and been heartened by the chancellor's refusal to ban a speaker.'
¶
But as Cohen suggests, this is a very different Berkeley. The administration rejected calls to ban Yiannopoulos. And the fact that Free Speech Week is happening at all -- and that people are expected to be able to freely protest it -- exemplifies the kind of free speech that Savio supported."

"UC Berkeley's Office of Communications and Public Affairs recently launched a website dedicated to free speech as part of Chancellor Carol Christ's promise that UC Berkeley will have a 'free speech year.'
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The site includes links to articles about free speech, campus policies on hosting speakers and protesting safely, a list of upcoming free speech events and a timeline of the Free Speech Movement. There is also a Q&A page, as well as a moderated public discussion forum."

"The university's current position on free speech is ironic when we delve deeper into the true nature of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and the political forces that opposed it. Amid the context of both the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement consisted of mass student mobilizations to gain the right to on-campus political activity opposed to segregation and the war. These acts of protest resulted in intense repression from the conservative administration and law enforcement, culminating in the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history when close to 800 students were detained while occupying Sproul Hall in December of 1964. Predictably, the current UC Berkeley administration has discarded the true spirit of the Free Speech Movement to hide behind a commodified version, allowing them to sanitize the retelling of social movements for their own interests."

"'That means we defend the rights of provocateurs to share their objectionable thoughts at our university campuses.... That does not mean we have to allow rhetoric that personally intimidates or harasses others.'
¶
She acknowledged that the line is difficult to define, but said UC officials should cut off any speaker who is 'personally going after a member of the audience.'"

"The fourth day, if it takes place as advertised, is likely to generate the most controversy. Entitled 'Mario Savio is dead,' a reference to the one-time leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the Sixties. Supposedly confirmed speakers include Yiannopoulos, Bannon and Coulter addressing higher education and free speech."

"The Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was led by UC Berkeley students who protested the administration's ban on campus political activities.
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Berkeley is once again a battleground, but five decades later two things are glaringly different: This isn't a student movement, and it's not about free speech."

"And so they don't understand the difference between how we say it's right to act in a community, whether it's a classroom or a dormitory, and what a public speaker is allowed to say in a public square. So there is a kind of disagreement right now about free speech. I sometimes say ironically that in 1964 it was the students for free speech and the administration was against it; now you've got this weird reversal.
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What are other changes?
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Political polarization. We obviously have a situation in the United States of the left and right finding it harder and harder to talk to each other. And there's a willingness on both the far left and the far right to engage in violence. It's a moment that reminds me of the '60s where you had things like the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weathermen. There are groups - now I'm just talking about the left but it's equally true on the right - who have just given up on the political process and feel their important weapon is platform denial, and a willingness to engage violently. And that's very new.
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The third thing in this very combustible mix is, universities are seen as the most important symbolic stage for this confrontation, and Berkeley is No. 1 among all of the symbolic stages in part because of its history with the free speech movement and in part because of its history as a very liberal campus."

"I vividly recall the famous 'free speech' movement at Berkeley several decades ago. The hard left demanded the right to express radical, often obnoxious, views on campus. Some on the hard right sought to ban these hard left expressions. Free speech prevailed.
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Now it is the hard right that is demanding the right to make provocative speeches on campus and it is elements of the hard left that are trying to censor them.
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But there is no symmetry in the means used to silence opponents. Today's hard left, led by Antifa and other radical and anarchistic gangs, do not shrink from the threat or use of violence to silence speakers with whom they disagree. These unlawful tactics have prevailed and several right wing speakers were forced to cancel their scheduled appearances on the Berkeley campus. This time free speech is losing.
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Protesters must not be allowed to block access to the speech, to threaten violence against the speaker or his audience, to shout down the speaker or to take any other action that prevents the speaker from completing his talk."

"[UT President Bill] Powers said there is no better way to improve than to take risks and learn from them.
¶
Powers said he has done this in his own life by going to Berkeley during the free speech movement, traveling the world and going to law school."

"Waters sat in conversation with publisher Steve Wasserman, her lifelong friend and a fellow activist from the time of the Free Speech Movement. Given this connection and free speech's recent reincarnation as a national political buzzword, it's no surprise that a large portion of the evening was dedicated to discussing Waters' experience with the movement.
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Wasserman opened the conversation by asking Waters about the memoir's dedication to Mario Savio. Waters' voice glowed with reverence as she answered. Her first encounter with Savio, she said, came on her very first day at UC Berkeley as she was standing in the margins of a throng of students gathered on Sproul Plaza.
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'I just heard Mario speak, and there was something about his ideal big vision which said we could change the world,' Waters said.
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Unlike the majority of contemporary allusions to the Free Speech Movement, Waters' invocation of it made no attempt to depoliticize the movement to render it a lifeless rhetorical tool that can be recontextualized at will. She spoke proudly of her lived experience with the movement and of its role in awakening her to become a self-proclaimed counterculture cook -- a title she continues to occupy through her persistent advocacy for edible education and sustainable agriculture."

"As conservative speakers make plans to exercise their free speech at UC Berkeley in September, those present at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement have sadly witnessed its change over time.
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Manhattan Institute's Senior Fellow Sol Stern was there during the original Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. During a recent exclusive interview with Stern, reminiscing of a time when opposing ideas were welcomed at Berkeley, Stern states, 'We [The New Left] believed we had the best ideas…we welcomed the challenges in debating our ideas with conservative professors on campus. You wouldn't have dreamed of excluding them.'"

"Waters attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1960s at the height of the Free Speech Movement and campus uprisings against the Vietnam War. The counterculture spirit electrified her, she writes, and instilled her with idealism and the feeling she could change the world. Her book is dedicated to the 'memory of Mario Savio' the movement's late leader."

"It wasn't long until Waters joined the Free Speech Movement, which gained considerable traction under the leadership of activist Mario Savio. (Waters' new book is dedicated to his memory - and the Free Speech Movement Café was funded by a gift in honor of Savio.)
¶
'(Savio) always seemed to see the big picture,' she said. 'It wasn't just about stopping the war in Vietnam. He was speaking about coming together and sharing values. … It was very, very important that we stood together and created this world together."

"As an alumnus of the 1964 Free Speech Movement and a veteran of the civil rights movement, I was appalled to read about the recent violent confrontations in Berkeley.
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Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi.
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Then we were the equivalent of the 'fascists' that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, not fascists, but like Antifa, they believed we were invaders who held them and their Southern values in contempt. The local whites whose towns we marched in burned us with their hate stares, blistered our ears with their curses, threw bottles and firecrackers at us, drove cars into our march lines, and sometimes used fists and bats. Guns were visible. Occasionally someone was shot.
¶
Sometimes law enforcement stood between us and our detractors, their faces and rifles always pointed at us, and sometimes they took a vacation, leaving us to the will of the crowd.
¶
Sound familiar?
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What we learn from these comparisons is that when a group or a person significantly dissents from deeply held community-wide views it will be attacked when it publicly challenges those views, and the attackers will feel justified without any concern for 'free speech' as a more important value.
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That is dangerous. As UC Berkeley's Chancellor Carol Christ put it 'Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.'"

"Political scientist Jo Freeman, part of the radical student movement that forced UC Berkeley to permit political speech five decades ago, said she was dismayed at the effort that went into silencing opposition. She drew similarities between those who threatened her and other freedom marchers in the South in the 1960s, and those who bully the far right now.
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'It is not uncommon for societies to produce a hate squad,' Freeman said. 'People who want to suppress the right to speak -- they are everywhere.'"

"Student activism was born during the 1960s free-speech movement at Berkeley, when thousands of students at the university mobilized to demand that the school drop its ban on political activism." [Ed note: student activism was born the day after students were invented.]

"That's not how the school approached the free-speech issue as recently as last year and it's certainly not how the school addressed it in the 1960s. In 1964, Dean of Students Katherine Towle prohibited students from taking positions on off-campus political issues because the university was hoping to minimize student involvement in political demonstrations off campus.
¶
But the announcement backfired spectacularly. Faculty and students, led by a young Mario Savio, protested for months and ultimately won the right to speak openly. In response, most other colleges in the U.S. loosened regulations around political activity by students."

"His undergraduate experience outside the classroom was affected by the California sun and sea and the free speech movement in the 1960s.
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Of the student activism on campus at the time, [Richard] Fain says he learned an important lesson about how to work together to accomplish great things. 'I really saw the value of working with other people.' he said. 'If people really do work toward a common goal, nothing stops them.'"

"For Adrianne Aron, an insecure girl from St. Louis who broke off from her parents when they wouldn't pay for her to go to college -- 'they said girls could get a husband as easily by staying home' -- her activism began when she heard Mario Savio, a charismatic leader of the Free Speech Movement, at UC Berkeley. 'I was terrified,' she told a trio of students, recalling her early days at Berkeley. 'I was afraid to open my mouth. I sat and admired students with the ability to ask intelligent questions. They had something I didn't have: self-confidence, for they came from families with love and support.'
¶
But she said Savio 'was really speaking to the marginalized. He was a leader with the ability and desire to speak meaningfully, to connect us to a movement.' She participated in the student strike in 1962 and the anti-Vietnam war movement, and went to Cuba with other young Americans to cut sugar cane for Fidel Castro in defiance of the U.S. boycott. She became a psychologist who worked with survivors of torture in Central America.
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Her words resonated with Alina Aceves, who'll be a senior at James Logan High this year. 'She was sheltered; she was a follower. Her eyes opened up; I connected with that.'"

"The free speech issue drew the biggest spotlight in the new chancellor's daylong media interviews and welcoming remarks to 9,500 new students. Christ, dressed in blue ceremonial robes, told the new arrivals that Berkeley's free speech movement was launched by liberals and conservatives working together to win the right to advocate political views on campus.
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'Particularly now, it is critical for the Berkeley community to protect this right; it is who we are,' she said. 'That protection involves not just defending your right to speak, or the right of those you agree with, but also defending the right to speak by those you disagree with, even of those whose views you find abhorrent.'
¶
She drew loud applause when she asserted that the best response to hate speech is 'more speech' rather than trying to shut down others, and when she said that shielding students from uncomfortable views would not serve them well."

"In July, Berkeleyside sat down with the new chancellor, the first woman to hold the position. The Victorian literature scholar was still settling into her new office in California Hall, so shelves were empty and walls were bare - save for the photographs of the Free Speech Movement that came with the place. Christ, who served as UC Berkeley's executive vice chancellor and provost both before and after her stint at Smith, didn't travel far to take up her new post, and she had quickly gotten down to business."

"What makes your time at UC Berkeley more difficult than that of prior generations is that the campus's reputation of being the gold standard for free speech is under attack. It is up to you preserve this great tradition that started when Mario Savio and others in the Free Speech Movement fought to ensure that your campus be an open avenue to passionately discuss issues without violence, legal repercussion or censorship.
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Don't ever forget the profound impact of this movement. The bravery of these men and women was instrumental in creating the blueprint for helping future generations combat racial injustices, empower the disenfranchised and speak truth to power."

"Progressives deserve the same speech protection as conservatives. The American Civil Liberties Union and the PEN organization have gone out of their way to defend the rights of provocative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campuses, but have been virtually silent on cases involving leftist or progressive faculty members who face suspension for provocative comments."

"We have serious work ahead to ensure that college campuses not only understand the full set of legal issues around free speech but also embrace the need for robust representation and debate across the political spectrum. Those on the left who have sought to close down offensive or dissenting views have provided an easy target for the right. By rejecting the procedural commitment to free speech, they have also undermined the substantive value of free speech, which will come back to haunt them as a precedent to censor expressions of their own views. Those on the right who have used invitations to controversial speakers to create headlines rather than foster intellectual exchange have in turn used the thinnest of procedural reeds to undermine the real substance of free speech as well."

"In other words, the Free Speech Movement activists hated liberalism, properly understood: they had no use for free speech-their sponsorship of it was nothing but a useful tool to advance their radical politics." [Ed note: that would be the FSM support of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.]

"Mr. Lawrence is graduating this summer, nearly a year early, a decision reinforced by how Berkeley has dealt with the turmoil. 'I don't want to be on a campus where I'm looking over my shoulder all the time, but the people I'm constantly looking over my shoulder for can stand on the steps of Sproul' -- where the Free Speech Movement was born, in 1964 -- 'and give a press conference.'
¶
'Everyone just kind of wants to keep their head down, and the administration is really hypocritical about what's going on, for all their talk about wellness and campus climate. A pretty big part of me feeling safe on my campus, it doesn't seem crazy to say, is that there not be any Nazis here.'
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'People need to understand this whole thing, this whole conflict isn't about free speech.'"

"To realise what a lamentable travesty this is, remember that Berkeley was famous for its pro-free speech movement in the 1960's. The student body of the University of California was instrumental in breaking the shackles of cold war conformity. Mario Savio, a leading figure of the movement, gave his famous speech on the Berkeley campus. It warrants quotation here:
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'We're human beings! … There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious - makes you so sick at heart - that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
¶
The fundamental tenet that Savio and his compatriots espoused was freedom: freedom to criticise the government, freedom to discuss controversial political ideologies, freedom to think outside established norms. It is distressing as a free speech advocate for KPFA to take essentially the same stance as the establishment did 50 years ago. Henry Norr, a former board member of the station, wrote in an email that Dawkins was 'an outspoken Islamophobe.' This may not be surprising to anyone familiar with the state of public debate on university campuses in the US and abroad, but it is an insidious indictment on the institutions that seem so happy to play the role of censor."

"In 1964, a student protest -- what would become known as the 'Free Speech Movement' -- sprang up at the University of California at Berkeley. Students insisted the administration lift a ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech. A series of demonstrations that saw students arrested and jailed eventually led to a new chancellor acceding to student demands. In 1965, Jerry Rubin and others established the Vietnam Day Committee -- a cornerstone of the nascent anti-war movement -- in Berkeley. The same year, the owner of Berkeley's Steppenwolf bar started an alternative newspaper called the Berkeley Barb."

"The Free Speech Movement took place under [Edward W.] Strong's chancellorship. Thousands of students gathered on Sproul Plaza to protest the ban on campus political activities. Nearly 800 students were arrested for occupying Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, 1964, the largest mass arrest on a national university campus at the time.¶
After months of protests as a part of the Free Speech Movement, Strong resigned amid controversy over his handling of free speech activities on campus."

"If you understand the subtext of the ACLU – I think that is precisely what the piece is getting at. But their target audience is not conservatives already convinced that college campuses are the problem, but rather liberal ones who unfortunately seem to need to be convinced that free speech protects them rather than exposes vulnerable populations.¶
....¶
This is a key message that I try to get across in my lectures. I tell it through a recitation of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the shooting at Kent State. It was not long ago that college campuses were clamping down on the free speech of the left – the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, rather than what they are doing now in fighting the Milos of the world.
¶
The test of civil liberties is during the trying times. The point I make in my lectures is that any tyrannical government will allow you the 'freedom' to sing their praises. The test is whether they will permit dissent."

"Mario Salvio -- leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement -- famously said, 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!'
¶
That was what we attempted to do last week: put our bodies upon the gears, wheels, levers and entire apparatus of the occupation Machine, which has been functioning at top speeds for 50 years. Our sit-in aimed to stop the Israeli police from entering the Muslim Quarter and closing Palestinian businesses, therefore forcing the March of the Flags to be rerouted and enter through another gate."

Free Speech Movement Punch Card, 1964--'The origin of the picture is unknown. it's an artifact of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) which is one of the earliest civil rights movements that originated at the University of California, Berkeley. The movement used punch cards, an artifact of early computing, to make the point that the use of computers is turning people into data and turning universities into machines. They were using the materials of technology to make an argument against technology.'" [ed note: the photo is by Howard Harawitz. The FSM was not arguing against technology, but against the University of California. In another context the FSM complained that punchcards were to be treated better than students. Members of the FSM made great use of technological tools, including various forms of printing, public address systems, audio recording, and photography. FSM arrestee Lee Felsenstein went on to design the first portable computer, the Osborne 1.]

"What, if anything, did this have to do with free speech and the Free Speech Movement?
¶
It had to do with the issue of student self-determination, with expressive behavior, not political speech. We wanted to express ourselves by creating a park, for a practical purpose. The student movement in the 1960s was a political movement that had a strong cultural basis to it. In the Bay Area, it was joined to the youth movement that stressed sex, drugs and rock and roll, the kind of hippie culture that flourished in the Bay Area. This was a precursor to today's issues of urban farming and community gardens. People looked at it in that way. Free speech in a broader sense means the right of the community to make decisions on how land is to be used going forward."

"22-year-old media studies junior Robin Cid Calleja, who was raised in Las Piñas in Manila, sees the same picture.
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'Sproul continues to be a bustling plaza where students can engage in social, cultural, and political activities. It continues to be the heart of student activities, where various student groups -- including racial minorities, like Filipino students who make up barely 2% of the student population -- can have their identities represented and where political minorities on campus, such as the Berkeley College Republicans, can express their ideas and opinions. I think that shows that the Free Speech Movement's legacy lives on,' he said.
¶
For Calleja, those lamenting the death of free speech in Berkeley are unaware of the spirit of the movement.
¶
'They need to understand that while free speech protects people from state- or university-sanctioned censorship or retaliation, it does not protect them from being ridiculed by their peers. Peaceful protests and harsh criticisms from liberal students are not indications that the Free Speech Movement is dead. Rather, these are (acts of) free speech at work,' Calleja said."

"Jim Smith never forgot the day he got arrested as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, 53 years ago.
¶
Smith, who died at 72 on Mother's Day, wasn't alone. Almost 800 others were arrested in 1964 at a sit-in in Sproul Hall. Students were protesting university restrictions on campus political activities and their free speech. It was the start of the historic Free Speech Movement led by Mario Savo.
¶
I met Smith years later when I was managing editor of the Press-Telegram, and he was a manager in our circulation department.
¶
He would talk about his experience and how proud he was that he got involved. He called it his 'awakening' on social and political issues.
¶
He was 'a dyed-in-the-wool liberal,' according to his wife, Wendy. He was against the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq and anything that he thought would inhibit free speech. He was for women's rights and tolerance for all people."

"I was born and raised in Oakland, the child of solidly upper-middle class parents with a devotion to social justice. My father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and helped start the free speech movement in Berkeley, and my mother moved across the country to learn to care for people with mental illness and fight for women's right to educational and professional advancement. For years, beginning at the age of 6, I was the only white kid -- or one of only a couple -- on my West Oakland baseball teams. I fell in love with -- and eventually married -- a woman who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a second-generation Mexican American. I followed her to Mexico, where we lived for a year in an idyllic town that counted me among its few white residents."

"In order to dismantle this romanticized version of events, we take a deeper, more critical examination of this supposed "Home of Free Speech™" and argue that the very framework of free speech rights developed during the FSM -- a time nostalgically remembered by the American public as the apex of leftist countercultural student movements -- was, in fact, a mechanism to build coalition between liberals and conservatives. We trace these developments through one character in particular, John Searle, who played a key role in bridging this particular campus divide through the promotion of a sanitized, depoliticized free speech framework in the early sixties. Finally, we demonstrate how this legacy bears on the contemporary resurgence of free speech as a tool to advance conservative white nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas."

"Like the video for their first Trouble Maker offering, 'Ghost of a Chance,' Rancid tear through 'Telegraph Avenue' in a simple basement setting. Singer/guitarist Tim Armstrong opens the song with recollections of his teenage years hanging out and playing music on the titular street, which runs from Downtown Oakland to the edge of the University of California, Berkeley campus. In the second and third verses, Armstrong sings about the Free Speech Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests that gripped the school and city in the Sixties, referencing activist Mario Savio and then-California Governor Ronald Reagan."

"Dick Beahrs: The Free Speech Movement had occurred and that shook me up. I came from a conservative home in Palo Alto. And one of the things I was taken aback by was that public figures wouldn't come to Berkeley to speak. They absolutely would not do it. So I took that upon myself as an objective. I got Robert Kennedy to come, and I got King to come."

"Although more modest in scale than the de Young's current Summer of Love extravaganza, the California Historical Society's current exhibition On the Road to the Summer of Love, running through Sept. 10, offers important context through photos, memorabilia, and audiovisuals. (And at $5, the price is right.) Rooms on the Beats and the Free Speech Movement trace the Bay Area's proudly rebellious bohemianism back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. The folk revival (check the pictures of a pre-rock Janis Joplin and short-haired Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen), the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the experimental music of the San Francisco Tape Music Center all get their due as vital forces in the city's simmering volcano.¶
...¶
The Free Speech section features not just the expected shot of Joan Baez, but also a couple shots of folkie Barbara Dane, who was probably even further to the left of Baez." [Ed note: the photos of Barbara Dane by Erik Weber were made after the end of the Free Speech Movement, during the anti-war movement.]

"In 1964, Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg and others defiantly mobilized Berkeley students in the cause of campus activism, free speech and academic freedom. They were joined by a thousand strong faculty, making Berkeley a national symbol of campus free speech and protest. By contrast, the stony silence of Berkeley's faculty majority in 2017 is deafening."

"The events at Berkeley and Middlebury have drawn scorn from observers across the political spectrum, including some founders of the free speech movement that took root at Berkeley in the 1960s. Jack Weinberg, who was arrested on campus in 1964 for violating school codes on activism and sparked a wave of protests to change them, said he found 'the whole thing despicable.'
¶
'When you suppress ideas, you also increase interest in those ideas,' Weinberg said. 'It's understandable that people want to stop it, but it doesn't work.'"

"At Berkeley, the loyalty oath experience continued to resonate through the 1960s and the birth of the free speech movement, which militated against Vietnam- and civil rights-era restrictions on political speech on the campus. And the issues continue to resonate today -- not least as a reminder that the loyalty oath affair was fueled at least partially by UCLA's speaking invitation to Laski.
¶
Free-speech challenges still erupt at Berkeley and other UC campuses, but wholesale disqualifications for one's political beliefs or even political statements haven't been tried since. That doesn't mean they won't recur -- political attacks on university faculty members are common, generally as right-wing attacks on supposed liberal leanings of university professors." [ed note: the FSM was over before anti-Vietnam organizing began.]

"The late Mario Savio likely would have loathed the ideas of all three. I'm thinking, though, that he would have been more distressed at the way the protest culture he helped spawn has tried to silence those ideas, rather than to defeat them with better ideas."

"In 1964, neither Nixon nor Reagan appeared to have a bright future. But after Berkeley, both captured the presidency twice. And both benefited mightily from denouncing rioting students, even as liberalism suffered from its perceived association with them."

"While Baby Boomers are lecturing them about 'tolerance' for hateful speech and misrepresenting the history of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, young people are thinking about the Occupy protesters who were pepper-sprayed by police at UC Davis.
¶
They're thinking about the hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters tossed in jail for demonstrating against police brutality.
¶
Now, they'll be thinking of Desiree Fairooz.
¶
If 'free speech' applies only to some Americans, it's hardly free."

"It's been about a week since Ann Coulter tried but failed to speak on the Berkeley campus, and the outrage continues unabated. Outrage that once again a conservative was silenced on a liberal campus. Outrage that the university cancelled her appearance and refused to provide appropriate protection for her. Once again, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement is depicted as a place where free speech--at least for conservatives--went home to die. But what actually happened between the university, Coulter and the three student groups that wanted to host her? Here's our attempt to set the record straight on several misconceptions about the Coulter incident.
¶
Misconception 1: UC Berkeley cancelled the Ann Coulter event.
¶
Among the most popular rumors is one of Berkeley cancelling Coulter's event--a claim reported by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other mainstream publications, with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks even referring to the event as 'now-cancelled' in an op-ed the day before the event.
¶
But in actuality, the university never agreed to host Ann Coulter in the first place."

"Visitors to the exhibition are taken down an amazing road, beginning in the late 1950s with the Beatniks in North Beach and ending in late 1967 with the Diggers' Death of the Hippie ceremony. The exhibition explores iconic moments-such as Jack Weinberg in a police car at UC Berkeley at the birth of the Free Speech Movement-as well as less well-known, but none-the-less formative, events."

"As Mukund Rathi, a law student at UC Berkeley and member of the ISO [International Socialist Org], explained at the demonstration:
¶
'The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose out of the struggles of civil rights activists and socialists against segregation and anti-Black racism in California. These activists, many of them students, were engaging in militant demonstrations and sit-ins to win equal rights for Black people...
¶
It is absurd for the far-right provocateurs, white supremacists and the College Republicans to claim this legacy...
¶
The greatest threat to free speech, on college campuses and elsewhere, comes from these right-wing forces. They will use violence against those who wish to speak and assemble freely. And this should not surprise us--we can't possibly believe that white supremacists and neo Nazis have anything but violent hostility towards their opponents.'"

"Visitors to the exhibition are taken down an amazing road, beginning in the late 1950s with the Beatniks in North Beach and ending in late 1967 with the Diggers' Death of the Hippie ceremony. The exhibition explores iconic moments-such as Jack Weinberg in a police car at UC Berkeley at the birth of the Free Speech Movement-as well as less well-known, but none-the-less formative, events.
Listening stations with audio clips provide a unique way to be a part of these moments in history. They include a reading of the famed poem "Howl" by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1959; poems from all of the poets at the famed Six Gallery reading that introduced 'Howl,'; Mario Savio's legendary speech at the Free Speech Movement sit-in at UC Berkeley in December 1964; and the Grateful Dead on stage at the 1967 Human Be-In. Musician Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane and actor Peter Coyote, once a member of the artist-anarchist collective The Diggers, reflect on the era as well. "

"The FSM was not an isolated product of Berkeley liberalism. It was partially a product of students who grew up hearing about and had sometimes themselves participated in the nonviolent civil rights movement of the South. A freshman on campus in the Fall of 1964 would have been in elementary school during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and just about to begin their senior year of high school when the March on Washington occurred. A junior or senior on campus might have been to Mississippi to organize voter education programs the summer before. The FSM's relatively peaceful reaction to heavy-handed restrictions on their traditional free speech zone were the result of nearly a decade of non-violent direct action modeled by the civil rights movement. This of course is easily lost if all one has are the campus protest photographs; most of the participants are white, and the pictures are of events on campus, meaning that the modern viewer can easily miss the broader connections to nonviolent protest which was key to Cold War social change. Those who value the FSM now, may not value nonviolence as a form of protest in the same way."

"Legendary folk musician Joan Baez, a veteran of the original free speech movement, is standing up for conservative author Ann Coulter.
¶
After a dramatic series of events unfolded last week culminating in the cancellation of Coulter's scheduled lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Baez, often associated with her work in the Civil Rights movement, posted a statement condemning the censorship
¶
'Let the Ann Coulters of the world have their say,' the 76-year-old musician wrote. 'Trying to stop Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking or any group from marching will not stop the advance of fascism, but rather might strengthen it.'
¶
In her statement, Baez referred to censorship as 'one of the 14 characteristics of fascism' and argued it is not a 'pathway to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

"It doesn't matter whether or not you agree with what's being said. It doesn't particularly matter if you're offended by it, either. What matters is that the principle of free speech remains uncompromised, and that everyone is allowed to say their piece. It doesn't mean that you have to listen to the people you disagree with (though you should). It means that it simply isn't acceptable to respond to them with anything other than speech. That means no violence, no threats, and no censorship.
¶
Berkeley was a center of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and it should be one now more than ever. The country is highly polarized, and it's imperative that all lines of communication remain open, even if what's being said is inflammatory. Words never killed anyone, but silence very well could.
¶
The university should allow Coulter to speak, it should provide any security necessary to ensure that her rights are protected, and it should live up to its commitments all those years ago to safeguard the rights of students. All universities should be places where all ideas are subjected to the same scrutiny, not isolated and homogeneous oases.
¶
Arthur Goldberg, one of the organizers of the Free Speech Movement, once asked 'How can I go to class and learn of our country's democratic processes when I'm not allowed to practice them on campus?' For both students' and the nation's success, speech must be met with speech. Otherwise we let the Coulters and Yiannopouloses of the world martyr themselves without ever having their ideology challenged.
¶
America is a constant conversation, one that universities should be active and unbiased participants in. That means, above all, that the freedom of speech must be protected."

"Milo Inc.'s first event will be a return to the town that erupted in riots when he was invited to speak earlier this year. In fact, Yiannopoulos said that he is planning a 'week-long celebration of free speech' near U.C. Berkeley, where a speech by his fellow campus agitator, Ann Coulter, was recently canceled after threats of violence. It will culminate in his bestowing something called the Mario Savio Award for Free Speech. (The son of Savio, one of the leaders of Berkeley's Free Speech movement during the mid-1960s, called the award 'some kind of sick joke'.)"

"Anyone not loyal to a certain ideology must be resisted, rejected, and renounced.
¶
Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around 355 B.C. that residents of Athens were free to praise Sparta's regime, but Spartans were banned from praising Athens.
¶
In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in Parliament. A century later, French revolutionaries incorporated into law the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which established free speech as a universal right. Two years later, the Americans ratified the First Amendment, which guarantees that the state shall not infringe on the right to free speech. Roughly a century and half later, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says, 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. . . . '
¶
I mention all of this because every time I read or hear about the pathetic state of affairs at the University of California, Berkeley -- where conservative speakers and rabble-rousers alike are banned from speaking lest they be assaulted by a mob -- journalists and other commentators insist on pointing out the irony that this is all happening 'where the Free Speech Movement was born.'
¶
Yes, I know there was a thing called the Free Speech Movement. And, yes, its members and leaders talked a good deal about free speech.
¶
But the movement for free speech is thousands of years old and runs like a deep river across the landscape of Western Civilization."

"Across the board, leaders of the Free Speech Movement denounce the violence that's occurred, and blame the current atmosphere on a hyper-partisan political climate -- one in which people tune out ideas they don't share, talk over each other instead of to each other, and, notably, one that runs counter to the ideals upon which the Free Speech Movement was created.
¶
Indeed, the original movement in the 1960s included thousands of students from all political and philosophical leanings.
¶
'You had in a room people representing 20 to 30 different groups, from far left to far right and everything in between,' says [Jackie] Goldberg. 'Pro-Goldwater forces and anti-Goldwater forces, you had the Jewish and Christian organizations, all the religious groups, even dormitories.'
¶
Goldberg and others joke that the incredible breadth of ideologies often meant meetings ran upwards of 15 hours.
¶
Another pillar of the movement was its commitment to nonviolence.
'We were at no time violent,' says [Anita] Medal. 'Even when they sent 400 motorcycle police on campus to threaten us, even during our arrests in December of '64, even when we were kicked in the head by police, stomped on, dragged down the stairs. We were nonviolent.'"

"BERKELEY, Calif. - The University of California, Berkeley, and the community around it have been symbols of free speech for more than 50 years. We still celebrate the legacy of Mario Savio and others who fought in the 1960s to ensure that the First Amendment be honored on campus."

"No one who has observed recent violence in Berkeley would dismiss the university's safety concerns. But it's important that a campus that was the birthplace of the free speech movement not succumb to what lawyers call the 'heckler's veto' -- the idea that a fear of disruptive or violent protest justifies canceling a speech by a controversial figure or shunting it to a time or place where it will have a significantly smaller audience."

"Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University who has written several books about the free speech movement, said that he saw the current contretemps as a 'free speech hustle'.
¶
'The free speech tradition that people made sacrifices to win is really in tatters,' Cohen said. He blamed the devolution on the 'short-sighted' reactions of the left and the 'opportunistic and cynical game that these rightwingers are playing'.
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When the university voted to allow political speech on campus in 1964, he said, they also insisted that the administration be allowed to regulate the 'time, space and manner' of such activity so as not to interfere with the normal functioning of the university.
¶
'If I want to have a rally, I can't do it in your English class,' Cohen said. 'If having an evening talk by a rightwing bigot is going to do $100,000 in property damage and disrupt the university, they have always had the right to say, no, do it during the daytime.'" [Ed Note: Daniel Savio is also quoted.]

"No, this is not a real free speech movement at Berkeley today, and that is because there has been no free speech violation by the UC administration. What the Coulter affair really amounts to is a 'time, place, and manner' quibble. The settlement of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, as embodied in the December 8 resolutions, included a provision authorizing the university to impose reasonable regulations on the 'time, place, and manner of political activity' on campus so that such activity does not interfere with 'the normal functions of the university.' The administration has used this 'time place and manner' authority in the face of the threats it received, acting on the belief that the time and place for the Coulter talk that would not end in violence and disrupt the normal functions of the university was in early May at a more secure location."

"'The primary danger is coming from the kind of ideas that Yiannopoulos and Coulter are spreading, but the other danger is a small group of people wearing bandanas coming out and breaking windows,' [Jack] Radey tells Newsweek. 'What they are doing is potentially making it impossible for nonviolent demonstrations to take place. They are giving the right-wing and neofascist types all the copy they need.'
¶
Anita Medal, who also participated in the Free Speech Movement, says she and her friends fought for Berkeley to be a forum for discussion during the civil rights movement. If the school thinks it needs additional security for Coulter's event, then the organizers should foot the bill-not scrap the speech entirely, she said.
¶
As for the protesters, 74-year-old Medal suggests teach-ins, lectures or Q-and-A sessions. She remains focused on peaceful, respectful debate, just like she did while facing off with the police at Berkeley five decades ago.
¶
'The ground was rumbling and we were terrified and we did nothing, even when we were arrested and they were beating us with sticks and kicking our heads in and dragging us down stairs,' Medal adds. 'We didn't get violent.'"

"In the 1960s, activists at the University of California, Berkeley started the American free speech movement, where millions of students across the country fought for free speech rights, largely in opposition to American intervention in Vietnam.
¶
In the United States of America, our rights to free speech are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and more. It has been an important part of our political tradition since our founding, and is one of our most important rights as citizens.
¶
While the vast majority of Americans support robust free speech protections, today's college students have committed themselves to shutting down all speech they disagree with, in the name of 'tolerance.'"

"A representative for Berkeley College Republicans, Harmeet Dhillon, wrote to Berkeley's interim Vice Chancellor, Stephen Sutton, to threaten a lawsuit if Coulter is not allowed to speak as planned on April 27. Dhillon declared the college's decision as a violation of their constitutional right to free speech.
¶
"It is a sad day indeed when the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, is morphing before our eyes into the cemetery of free speech on college campuses."
¶
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) took place during 1964 to 1965 on the Berkeley campus. It was led by students Mario Savio, Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, among others."

"Veterans of the Free Speech Movement of the '60s, a seminal moment in the university's history, are disheartened that Berkeley is now associated with violence and blocking speech instead of promoting it.
¶
'I don't think Ann Coulter has anything useful to say, but it was unconstitutional for the university to bar her from speaking,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, who took part in the movement and is the widow of Mario Savio, its leading spokesman.
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Ms. Savio sees a clear generational divide. Free speech, she said, was more of an absolute for her husband, who is commemorated outside Sproul Hall at the heart of the campus by the officially designated Mario Savio Steps.
¶
'Mario took a principled position -- it was free speech for all,' she said. 'I think free speech has slipped as a value.'"

"The way to confront and resist right-wing speech is not by violently attacking those who voice it, but by advocating on behalf of free speech, social justice, and non-violence. As FSM veteran Paul Coopersmith writes, 'We must not be remiss in confronting those on the far right, whose visions of how things ought to be lie so beyond the pale. But neither should we stoop to their level.' We can win over many Trump supporters with a progressive agenda that includes good jobs, good schools, restoration of the nation's decaying infrastructure, and medical care for all."

"There will be another clash because the provocateurs on the right know that if you want to start a public fight with the reactionaries on the left, you come to Berkeley to do it -- the campus or the city, it doesn't matter as they are one and the same in the eyes of the world. This is the way it has been forever, or at least in the half a century since the violent free speech movement of the 1960s birthed the liberal, supposedly tolerant haven Berkeley is now." [Editor's note: The 1964 FSM was a short-lived, non-violent movement. What violence they experienced issued from hecklers and police. The combatants in Berkeley are not the descendants of the Free Speech Movement. They serve some other ideal.]

"Berkeley is an exceptional institution whose history includes the 1964-1965 protests that gained fame as the Free Speech Movement. Long known as a hotbed of left-wing activism, it has lately gained attention as a place where right-wingers venture at their peril."

"On a December evening in 1964, 1,000 students marched into the Berkley's Sproul Hall and sat down. The protesters were inspired by the Free Speech Movement, a group demanding, among other things, that the university stop restricting political activity on campus.
¶
The students slept, sang, studied and talked until after 3 a.m., when the chancellor showed up and demanded that they leave, according to news accounts. A few did, but most stayed. Then things turned violent.
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'An Army of law officers broke up a massive sit-in occupation,' reported the Associated Press, which described 'limply defiant' protesters being dragged down the stairs on their backs and shoved into police vans. 'Cries of police brutality rose from demonstration supporters watching outside.'
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But university President Clark Kerr had lost his patience with the activists, declaring in a statement that the Free Speech Movement had 'become an instrument of anarchy.'
¶
By morning, police had arrested 796 students.
¶
The school would later relent to the pressure, loosening its rules against political activity on campus and making Sproul Hall a place for open discussion."

"But the history of conflict in Berkeley is also fraught with political peril. Amid sit-ins at the campus during the Free Speech Movement, Ronald Reagan defeated then-Gov. Pat Brown in part by harnessing middle-class anger over protests at what Reagan called a 'hotbed of communism and homosexuality.'
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Decades later, some longtime observers of Berkeley's protest culture fear escalating violence could now undercut the left's cause.
¶
'They have this incredible ideology which somehow conflates smashing windows with bringing down the state,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement. 'The protests in the early '60s were never like this, and even the anti-Vietnam War marches, where you had more physical interaction, were not, I don't think, as mindless … There's something very creepy about these people, the black-masked people.'"

"Fifty years is a long time. In 1964 University of California students were barred from distributing flyers about major issues of the day, including the civil rights struggle. The resulting protests kicked off the Free Speech movement, whose anniversary was duly commemorated by National Public Radio in 2014:"

"Berkeley is also a potent symbol because of its role as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964:
¶
Before fall 1964, students' politicking had been limited to a small sidewalk strip thought to be off-campus and immune from university restrictions. Students such as Mario Savio returned from searing experiences as civil rights workers in the South and sought to expand campaigns in California, upsetting some state legislators.
¶
After learning that the property was owned by UC, school authorities moved to shut down the area and ban the tables and pamphleting there. Activists challenged the rules by resuming their activities. Three months of confrontations, demonstrations and negotiations followed and became international news. Eventually, the restrictions were lifted with some limitations -- a victory that paved the way for later protests supporting women's' rights and environmentalism and opposing the Vietnam War."

"Such was the story revealed by rock journalist and respected author, Ben Fong Torres, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the now-legendary San Francisco Summer of Love. In the Cal Alumni Association publication, California, Torres noted how an eclectic mix of more than 20,000 relatively apolitical Haight Ashbury hippies and Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans from across the bay collided in a 'two-headed' scene culminated in the Summer of Love."

"The Liberty Revival Alliance, formed by Rich Black, selected to hold a rally in Berkeley because he and others believe the city is not tolerant of differing perspectives, as evidenced by the fact that black bloc and Antifa protesters forced the cancellation of Milo Yiannapolous' speech at Cal on Feb. 1. Coming and talking here is a way to uphold free speech, a fundamental American right, they say. They also play up what they see as the irony that the Free Speech Movement happened in Berkeley.
¶
But some on the far left who oppose the alt-right believe free speech only goes so far. Espousing racist and homophobic ideas encourages violence and should be stopped, they say."

"In the foreword, Jann Wenner writes, ¶
I was a student at UC Berkeley when I started reading Ralph Gleason's column 'On the Town' in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the only place I knew to find a certain social, cultural, and political mix that was coming to define my world. He understood rock and roll and became a singular voice that stood out among other music and jazz writers. He got the Beatles and Bob Dylan and what was making them so special to a generation. The Free Speech Movement, the first of numerous student uprisings in the sixties, had overwhelmed the Berkeley campus. He was the only journalist in the Bay Area who gave the FSM a fair shake."

"UC Berkeley has a long history of student activism, from the Free Speech Movement to the campaign for divestment from apartheid South Africa. The Free Speech Movement, when students organized for the right to campaign for political causes on campus, is now lauded by the student guides on campus tours. Less mentioned is the period of protest against the Vietnam War."

"The counter-culture was musical, sartorial, pharmacological, sexual, and scatological-but it was not yet fully political. Thinking that by changing the self they could change the world, the anti-establishment rebels remained committed in this respect to the individualism of the established cultural order. There were a few anti-authority student movements, primarily the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ((SNCC), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (FSM). In the months and years following the first teach-ins, mounting student anxieties about military conscription gave an impetus to draft-card burnings and other student political action, but not so much as in the early days of the Johnson escalation, when the university resistance, at the instigation of the left-liberal faculty, broke out en masse. It was the teach-ins that largely politicized the counter-cultural generation and effectively nationalized the anti-war protest."

"In the U.S., socialists of the IS tradition played an unheralded role building support in the North for the civil rights movement. During the 1960s, the Independent Socialist Club was formed literally in the midst of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement by leaders of that struggle, which served as a launching pad for the anti-Vietnam War movement." [Ed note: see: http://www.fsm-a.org/FSM%20Documents/Independent%20Socialist%20Club/Webpages/gallery-01.html]

"The extension of free speech to universities was famously championed by the UC Berkeley Free Speech movement, which emerged to defend left-wing students who wanted to distribute radical literature and make radical speeches on campus. Winning that fight came at the price of students being beaten and jailed." [Ed note: Actually, the FSM was formed by a left-right coalition to win right to speak and distribute literature of any political nature.]

"Berkeley has a rich history of political activism-the town's university calls itself the home of the free speech movement-and that self-image is part of what motivated the city council to take action.
¶
'We were one of the first cities to standup against apartheid--that's a movement that took off and spread and that's very important,' Councilmember Sophie Hahn told KPIX 5."

"No small irony rings through the fact that the last half-century has seen college students go from protesting hate speech in the 1960s Free Speech Movement to, however unconsciously, now propagating it themselves by shouting down controversial individuals who come to campus."

"[Lynnae Evans:] I was at Berkeley in 1964. When the Free Speech Movement occurred, there were pickets placed around all of the classes. We were told we shouldn't cross those lines. I called my father, who was a Republican, and I said, 'You'll never guess what's going on at Berkeley, but there's a Free Speech Movement and we're being encouraged not to go to class.' He said, 'You need to go to class.' I called my grandfather, and he said: 'You never cross a picket line, you find out what the issues are and you support them.' My grandfather had supported the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] and the Teamsters' union and he always felt he couldn't vote for FDR because FDR was too conservative. He voted for the socialist candidate." [Ed note: The strike happened just after the 800 were arrested and led to the faculty voting to stand with the students and the strking of free speech restrictions. The strike lines would not have prevented Linnae Evans from attending class. She clearly had a choice.]

"Campus politics have flipped since the Free Speech Movement protests during the 1964-65 academic year at the University of California, Berkeley. Students then aimed at forcing the university administration to acknowledge their right to free speech and academic freedom. Now that the regressive left has come to dominate politics on the American campus, academic freedom is limited and free speech often repressed when it involves conservative views."

"The Free Speech Movement, led by a fiery Italian-American, Mario Savio, erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, the year I entered college. It was a cardinal moment for my generation. The anti-establishment stance of the Free Speech Movement represented the authentic populist revolution of the 1960s, which resisted encroachments of authority by a repressive elite. How is it possible that today's academic Left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy. An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong women and strong men."

"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was partly a reaction against in loco parentis, and although this framework has largely disappeared from higher education, it is still a useful way to understand the unique responsibilities that the BSC, a landlord in name but a steward in spirit, owes its members. It can also help explain some of the tensions that arise when these members bristle at the policies of their parent organization."

"The ISC emerged out of a split in the right wing of the Socialist Party. The political inspiration for the ISC was Hal Draper, a veteran revolutionary socialist and author of the popular pamphlet 'The Mind of Clark Kerr."'It was an examination of the president of the University of California system and his ideas for the modern university. It became the bible of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."

"In our contemporary understanding of what a university atmosphere can foment, activists on campuses have often been catalysts for seismic societal change. In February 1960, college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began a campaign of lunch counter sit-ins with the goal to promote desegregation in community facilities. In doing so, they acted on the precepts of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: 'The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.' It was these humble but brave actions that provided the spark that eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.This, in turn, spurred other college protests. When authorities at the University of California at Berkeley prevented students from distributing civil rights leaflets on campus in 1964, students responded with the Free Speech movement. This movement moved universities out of the grip of Cold War politics and ushered in a decade of student protest involving opposition to the Vietnam War and other issues such as minority rights, anti-Apartheid action, and more inclusivity for vulnerable populations outside the mainstream."

"In 1964, University of California Berkeley students fiercely protested against restrictive campus rules prohibiting non-approved political groups from operating on campus.
¶
These restrictive policies spawned the famous Free Speech Movement, engraving UC Berkley's legacy as the battleground for free-speech rights. The students led the fight and faced persecution from school administration were remembered as heroes." [Actually the rules also restricted approved student groups from political advocacy.]

"On Feb. 1, UC Berkeley police canceled a scheduled speech by Breitbart editor and alt-right supporter Milo Yiannopolous because of protests. School officials say the violence was caused by black-clad rioters unaffiliated with the university. But hundreds of students and staff signed petitions and called for the event's cancellation. Reporter Reis Thebault looks at the questions this incident raises about free speech on campus." [Ed note: Thebault interviews FSM arrestee Anita Medal]

"But what if black or Latino Middlebury students don't want to have a conversation about their human dignity? What if they prefer to assert it? If they did so, they'd be participating in a long tradition of campus free-speech defense that many critics overlook. They'd only be doing what Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, famously advised in 1964: putting their 'bodies on the gears' of an apparatus they call unjust.
'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can't take part,' Savio said. 'And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"

"That's basically the logic of the editorials that the Berkeley student newspaper published in defense of the rioters. 'A peaceful protest was not going to cancel that event,' wrote student Juan Prieto, 'just like numerous letters from faculty, staff, Free Speech Movement veterans and even donors did not cancel the event. Only the destruction of glass and shooting of fireworks did that. The so-called 'violence' against private property that the media seems so concerned with stopped white supremacy from organizing itself against my community.'" [Ed note: Prieto is wrong. The Free Speech Movement Archives Board, ie veterans, are on public record supporting the right of Yiannopoulos to speak and be heard.]

"Political intolerance is hardly confined to one side of the aisle. If conservatives represented the majority of students on campus, I am sure they would be silencing liberals. Universities must push back against the narrowing of ideology generally to guarantee an open intellectual space for all students.
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At a time of increased political tension in the country, it is also important for colleges to push students to learn how to grapple with different views. It was Mario Savio, the socialist leader of Berkeley's free speech movement in the 1960s, who argued that the university should be an intellectual realm where the 'hard light of free inquiry' can be brought upon any and all ideas -- be they liberal or conservative."

"In a class on the First Amendment, Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the UC Irvine Law School. and an ACLU liberal in the best tradition, is addressing this declining understanding in academia of what free speech means. He notes that the views of students on this subject evolve during the course as they are exposed to the history of speech and repression. They learn that the same arguments currently being used to rationalize suppression of speech have been used for centuries, often to repress movements on the left. They learn that whenever a group has asserted itself as an arbiter of permissible speech, it has abused that power.
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The Free Speech Movement that emerged on the Berkeley campus in 1964 rejected the notion that college administrators had the right to restrict political advocacy. The irony now is that it is administrators who are resisting calls by students and faculty to restrict speech. Recent UC presidents are to be lauded for a full- throated defense of all types of advocacy, whether by a Farrakhan or a Yiannopolous. Preserving the free marketplace of ideas is an existential priority for academia. Sadly, survival of that free marketplace may require that students and faculty consider taking Remedial Voltaire."

"In former times leftists, with the admittedly important exception of apologists for communist totalitarianism, used to champion free speech and campaign against censorship. The seminal moment in the emergence of the American New Left was the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the early sixties.
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What an awful contrast to the events at this same institution a few weeks ago where masked, black-clad thugs attacked a scheduled event with Molotov cocktails, fireworks and metal poles, bashing attendees in some cases to the point of unconsciousness as police stood by passively.
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These thugs style themselves as anti-fascists while employing classic fascist tactics from 1930s Europe. Scenes like this: peaceful, lawful assemblies being violently attacked, are an increasingly frequent occurrence all over the Western world, including here in Melbourne, and the perpetrators are overwhelmingly from the Left.
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So if political correctness is not just about being nice and polite, what is it?
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I think it is best described as an attempt to impose a comprehensive set of constraints on what can be said or debated, publicly or even privately, whenever such speech conflicts with the current version of the ever-changing identity politics ideology. It is the compliance and enforcement arm of this ideology.
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John Stuart Mill's dictum that 'he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that' is out the window. Instead of responding to disagreeable views with counter-arguments, the characteristic PC response is to say 'I am offended by what you said, and you should not be allowed to say it and furthermore the fact you even say such things marks you as a bad person'."

"So Yiannopoulos's Republican campus hosts are at miscast as the Free Speech Movement's political descendants. If there is any free speech dispute from Berkeley in the 1960s that the Yiannopoulos affair resembles (and even here the resemblance is limited) it is the obscenity controversy that erupted in spring 1965, a semester after the Free Speech Movement. That controversy concerned the right to use the obscene word 'Fuck' in public campus discourse. Some Free Speech Movement veterans supported this right, and others (like Savio) objected to the punishment of obscenity protesters on due process grounds. But most movement veterans and much of the Berkeley student body refused to rally to this cause because they felt that this use of obscenity was irresponsible and distracted from more serious issues facing the civil rights and antiwar movements.
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That's why journalists who labeled this obscenity affair 'the Filthy Speech Movement' erred, as it was impossible to build a mass movement at Berkeley in defense of obscene speech, impossible to re-assemble the old Free Speech Movement coalition for such a cause. Most of the Berkeley student body in 1965 was too wedded to the ideal of responsible political discourse to wave the 'Fuck' banner. In this sense they were more genuinely conservative than today's Berkeley College Republicans who not only wink at Yiannopoulos's obscenity, but also at its use to defame minority students."

"White nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley on the first day of Black history month in a building named after MLK. The event on February 1 was cancelled after a large protest erupted outside the Student Union where he was set to speak. Previously, a speaking event at UC Davis was shut down by anti-fascist protesters. Yiannopoulos and his supporters claimed that the protests and cancellations were counter to the values of Free Speech. The so-called Alt-Right have tried to identify their movement as an extension, or modern incarnation, of the Free Speech movement. Milo's supporters have invoked Mario Savio's name to support their interpretation of the Free Speech Movement." [Ed note: Recently Milo revealed that his guiding principle was not free speech but what the market will bear.]

"Besides the exhibit at YBCA exhibit, which is also screening Leeson's films in March and featuring her in a March 15 talk with Eleanor Coppola, Leeson's work is currently on view at her longtime San Francisco gallery, Anglim Gilbert, and in New York at Bridget Donahue Gallery. She'll be at New York's MoMA with Tania Bruguera on Feb. 27 for a screening of Tania Libre. Leeson's schedule is as packed as it ever was. Being recognized at YBCA, she says, is special.
'It's a glorious ending to those three decades of real pain and invisibility, and there was nothing I could even do about it,' she says. 'Coming out of the free-speech movement, and the silencing, I just feel so grateful to Lucia, who took the chance to do this show, to all the people who supported me all those years. It's great. People say, 'Why didn't it happen earlier?'
I don't know. But it happened. And maybe it will happen for the next generation -- that's also important -- who don't have to be silenced in a way that my generation was.'"

"But ultimately what occurred at U.C. Berkeley is symbolic of the way in which free speech has been under siege on college campuses despite the fact that U.C. Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, when over 3,000 students rallied for their full constitutional rights on campus."

"'[Savio] was a student activist and protester at Berkeley. There was a time when students were not allowed any canvassing or any tables on campus, he thought it was a violation of the first amendment,' said Jonah Raskin, Sonoma State professor emeritus and longtime friend of Savio.
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'He and a few other students protested and won the right to able to be active in politics. He also went to the South to register voters, that was a pivotal time in his life.'"

"Students were once in favour of free speech. In the mid-1960s, students of the University of California, Berkeley undertook a mass-movement for free speech. Under the leadership of Leftist heroes like Jack Weinberg, Bettina Aptheker and Jackie Goldberg, students demanded that the university administration retracted their on-campus ban of political activities. They demanded their freedom of speech. Mario Savio delivered what is generally recognised as the iconic speech of the University of California, Berkeley's (UCB) free speech movement. Here is the speech's most powerful section:
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'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it - that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'
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Savio's speech helped push the movement towards success. Berkeley students won their full rights. Students, now liberated from the 'machine' of university censorship, were able to create the anti-Vietnam student movement, another famous campus protest.
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Nowadays, the student Left are unwilling to honour Savio's legacy. On the 2nd of February, violent protests at Berkeley shut down a talk by popular conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos. Instead of maintaining a liberal and free atmosphere for speech and argument, Berkeley students have become the gears, wheels and levers of the machine that Savio wanted to stop."

"I stand with my peers from the Free Speech Movement: I believe that we need to hear all ideas, no matter how hateful, so that we can combat them the best way, with Justice Brandeis' classic antidote to speech we dislike, more speech."

"As California continues upon a path of ideological ricochet that in many quarters seeks complete separation from the nation, the prospects for freedom of speech have declined to incomprehensible limits. America's college campuses -- especially those in California -- are not simply victims of this trend, they are also important agitators for this breach of our most important civil rights. The free speech movement that began at Berkeley has come full circle. Violence against free speech is now argued by the university to be a moral end. Ironically, it was 50 years ago, that a great debater spoke on that campus urging for greater free speech in order to overcome the nation's scourge of racism. James Farmer Jr. was a prelude to the free speech movement of 1964."

"Jack Radey, a military historian in Oregon, is nearly 70 and remembers being dragged by two officers down the steps of Sproul Hall as a 17-year-old UC Berkeley student in the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
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Today, as he reflects on the black bloc anarchists who turned what might have been a peaceful student protest against Yiannopoulos into a fiery, destructive encounter, Radey doesn't see how officers could have dealt with the demonstration any better.
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'This black bloc business is really bad news,' he said of the anarchists who have showed up at protests in the Bay Area and across the country, presenting challenges to police trying to de-escalate their responses.
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'To identify the police as the enemy in all these cases is a mistake,' Radey said. 'Sometimes they're just trying to actually uphold the law.'"

"In the wake of the riots at Berkeley, California has an opportunity to take a leading role in restoring the primacy of free speech in higher education. To that end, I have introduced a resolution in the state Assembly for California's public universities to adopt the University of Chicago Statement on Free Expression.
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Adoption of the statement would reflect a bipartisan consensus. UC President Janet Napolitano, formerly in President Barack Obama's Cabinet, has called for 'more speech' at universities after raising concerns that freedom of speech has given way to freedom from speech. Obama himself has warned that on college campuses 'the unwillingness to hear other points of view can be as unhealthy on the left as on the right.'
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Freedom of speech is at the foundation of our democracy, and universities, of all places, should be lively environments where First Amendment freedoms flourish. Berkeley was the birthplace of the free speech movement in the 1960s, whose principles are now enshrined in the University of Chicago Statement on Free Expression."

"UC Berkeley is deeply rooted in a history of student protests. The Free Speech Movement in 1964, sparked by the administration's ban of on-campus political activities, was the first high-profile campus protest. Nearly 800 students were arrested for occupying Sproul Hall on Dec. 2, resulting in the largest mass arrest on an American university campus at the time."

"But it was the more practical approach that yielded results.
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An example came in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964-1965, a pivotal episode in the decade’s protest politics. When administrators would not allow students to hand out leaflets and fliers on a busy campus plaza, conservative students joined with leftist ones in the call for free speech.
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But then the stand-off became confrontational, and 'the right-wingers could not go along,' wrote the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who was teaching at Berkeley at the time. 'They stood aside from further escalations,' Glazer noted, such as when protesters surrounded a police car and staged a sit-in that sealed off a campus building." [Ed note: Goldwater supporters were among those arrested in December, 1964.]

"According to campus real estate spokesperson Christine Shaff, campus administration authorized neither the erection of the pole nor its removal.
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Shaff confirmed, however, that the pole was not an official monument. The official Free Speech Movement memorial, which was designed by artist Mark Brest van Kempen and constructed in 1991, is the 6-inch column of land and airspace on Sproul Plaza encircled within a granite ring, upon which the pole was originally erected. The 6-inch plot of soil and the airspace extending above it are defined as not belonging to any singular nation -- and as such, no laws can be acknowledged within the small space."

"As one of the 796 people to have been arrested in the early morning of Dec. 4, 1964, at the height of the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, I agree with members of the FSM Archive Board of Directors, that however bigoted and objectionable Milo Yiannopoulos and 'Breitbart News' may be, he should have been allowed to speak on campus.
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To prevent him from doing so was not only antithetical to those American values that we hold so dear, but, perhaps more to the point, only serves to energize and provide a bigger platform to the very people and organizations whom so many of us -- progressives, independents, Democrats and yes, Republicans -- find so reprehensible.
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We must not be remiss in confronting those on the far right, whose visions of how things ought to be lie so beyond the pale. But neither should we stoop to their level. We need to counter their offensive words and acts with truth, the strength of our convictions, and, when necessary, a willingness to put our bodies on the line, and say, 'Enough.'"

"Appalling as Trump's hypocrisy on free speech is, his Berkeley tweet and Savio masquerade demonstrate that when the Left advocates the banning of a speaker or disrupts a campus speech it not only tramples the legacy of the Free Speech Movement, but surrenders the moral high ground so completely that it puts itself in a position to be lectured on free speech by its nemesis in the oval office."

"What Mario Savio did in his FSM victory speech in 1964 was in its own way reminiscent of what Martin Luther King Jr. did in his March on Washington speech a year earlier. Both were seeing beyond their time, with King sharing his dream of an America freed from the shackles of racism and Savio envisioning a campus as it was being reborn, liberated from its history of binding restrictions on political expression."

"By the time I ducked out of Sproul Plaza after 8 p.m., Reddit's top article was about the Berkeley protests with more than 10,000 comments. Before I could have my journalistic say, the internet collectively decided the Berkeley student mob -- overcome with emotion and left-wing hysteria -- destroyed their own campus and killed the Free Speech Movement on its birthplace as Yiannopoulos became the martyr."

"This lecture, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session, will explore the state of free speech on campus as the media and critics report and distort it, as students experience it, and how it looks from a historical perspective. It will also consider ways that colleges and universities can enhance freedom of speech.
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[Robert] Cohen is a professor of history and social studies in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Cohen, who has an affiliated appointment in NYU's Department of History, has authored or edited several works on the history of free speech on campus, including: Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s; The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America; The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (co-edited with Reginald E. Zelnik); When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941; Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (co-edited with David Snyder); and Howard Zinn and the Spelman College Student Movement, 1963 (in press)."

"History is not an arc. It's a pendulum. The political ideology of those kept silent has changed, but the evil of oppression has once again become the same.
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I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement. I was proud to be a member of a community that insisted all voices be heard. I held my head high as I argued with my conservative father about the principles that made our country great."

"Anyway, where was I? Oh right: the Reasonabilists. I bring them up because I have been in a twitchy, quick-tempered, fugue state of dyspepsia and crankery for the last couple days ('Days?' -- The Couch) about the riot at Berkeley. I don't mean the violence or the fact that this couldn't have gone better for Milo, a click-baiting huckster and alt-right apologist.
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I don't even mean the fact that the authorities only arrested one person. Though that does vex me considerably. If you think free speech is assault but assault is free speech, you're a moron of world-historical proportions. And if you think rioting is some charming rite of passage, you deserve to have your campus destroyed."

"Savio's perspective drew from the reality of a university administration that treated students to a narrow version of education, forbidding on-campus political activity. Cal students objected, and it was from this desire for political expression on campus that the Free Speech Movement was born. Throughout the fall of 1964, Cal convulsed with peaceful protest, grinding the university 'machine' to a halt. Savio famously addressed thousands from atop a police car on Sproul, calling for peaceful protest -- 'That doesn't mean that you have to break anything!' [Ed note: these words are from December 2, not Oct. 1]-- and civil disobedience.
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The students' perspective, which Savio articulated so well, was that the university should encourage free speech and free thought, that debate and dispute should be part of higher education. Rather than arrest students for protesting, as the university was doing, it should provide wide-open space for political debate, allowing students to develop the tools to be engaged citizens."

"The unrest that roiled campus is not new. In the early 1960s, Berkeley launched the Free Speech Movement to throw off the shackles of stifling university bureaucrats. A motley crew of leftists, anarchists, and, yes, arch-conservative Barry Goldwater supporters banded together to stand up for the rights of students to protest, speak out, and actively participate in their campus discourse.
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The famous leader of that movement, Mario Savio, who is almost beatified in Berkeley lore, referred to the university officials and their government allies as a "machine" that required active resistance, saying: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus-and you've got to make it stop!'
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But his so-called successors often forget how Savio continued, 'That doesn't mean-I know it will be interpreted to mean … that doesn't mean that you have to break anything.' He explicitly opposed violence as a means of resistance.
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That sentiment, and the movement's ties to Goldwater, is lost on the agitators and enforcers of groupthink that predominate on campus. Instead, they are hell-bent on shutting down dissent."

"In a letter to The Daily Californian, Berkeley's student newspaper, Mr. [Jack] Radey and other members of the Free Speech Movement Archive board of directors, a grouping of some of the movement's activists, said Mr. Yiannopoulos was 'a bigot who comes to campus spouting vitriol so as to attract attention to himself.'
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But they said free speech was paramount.
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'Berkeley's free speech tradition, won through struggle - suspension, arrest, fines, jail time -- by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos, and it is that tradition's endurance that concerns us,' they wrote."

"Yiannopoulos rejects accusations he is racist or white supremacist, saying his boyfriend is black and his humor is taken too literally in today's politically correct culture.
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A group of veterans from Berkeley's 1960s Free Speech Movement praised administrators for allowing the event.
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'Even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus,' they wrote in In an op-ed published by Berkeley's The Daily Californian."

"This is a symbolic moment. The sight of students and radicals rioting out of fear of letting people listen and decide for themselves represents the unravelling of Enlightenment values in the academy. While Trump voters are often smeared as a prejudiced blob, this is what real, unthinking intolerance looks like. And it's a betrayal not only of the high-minded, liberal ideals on which the academy is founded, but also of the once radical left. The students of '64 knew that freedom was paramount. That's why, as FSMer Bettina Aptheker told me in 2014, they fought for free speech alongside right-wing students, some of them supporters of Barry Goldwater, the Trump of his day: 'The only requirement was that they believed in freedom of speech.'
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That when faced with a president so authoritarian young radicals can only respond in kind is a grim reminder of where self-willed censorship leads: to stupidity and blind rage. The casual presentation of right-wing wind-up merchants like Milo as the first act of a new fascism, and these students' inability to do anything other than wail when confronted with ideas they dislike, speaks to a new endarkenment. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, if you refuse to let your views be challenged they become like prejudices that you are incapable of defending or articulating. When you reject free speech you lose the opportunity to defeat ideas you dislike and propound your own. You trade changing the world for throwing things at it. That's what we saw playing out at Berkeley last night."

"Hours after the event was canceled, the College Republicans issued a statement declaring the Free Speech Movement dead. 'It is tragic that the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement is also its final resting place,' the statement said."

"Violence is not what Cal stands for. Violence is not what the Golden Bears should be known for. Our Cal family stands for peaceful expression and the Free Speech Movement. That is a right that was expressed early on this Wednesday night before it was hijacked by agitators who do not represent the viewpoints of our university's student body and our alumni base at large."

"Officials added that they regret that the threats and unlawful actions of a few have interfered with the exercise of First Amendment rights on a campus that is proud of its history and legacy as home of the Free Speech Movement. In an earlier message to the Berkeley campus community, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks made clear that while Yiannopoulos' views, tactics and rhetoric are profoundly contrary to those of the campus, UC Berkeley is bound by the Constitution, the law, the university's values and its Principles of Community that include the enabling of free expression across the full spectrum of opinion and perspective."

"'We deeply regret that the violence unleashed by this group undermined the First Amendment rights of the speaker as well as those who came to lawfully assemble and protest his presence,' Dirks wrote.
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Yet, in this cowardly new world of alternative facts, the narrative that UC Berkeley is full of intolerant leftists who shut down speech they don't like with rocks and commercial-grade fireworks has taken off. Yiannopoulos got what he wanted. And Trump, who has no problem with false narratives, went a step further by threatening to withhold federal funding from the UC system if 'innocent people with a different point of view' aren't allowed to speak.
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Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a UC Regent, called Trump's tweet 'asinine.' Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, called it an empty threat that's an abuse of power by a man who is 'president, not a dictator.'
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Far be it from us to dissuade condemnations or peaceful protests against Trump or Yiannopoulos. But there is a larger game afoot here. Don't play into it."

"'It's sad that these people consider themselves the intellectual descendants of Mario Savio,' [Berkeley College Republicans treasurer David] Craig said. 'The founder of the Free Speech Movement would be rolling in his grave to know that people in his name are shutting down speech they don't agree with and attacking people.'"

"In an op-ed in the Daily Cal, a dozen Free Speech Movement veterans -- including Lynne Hollander Savio, Mario's widow -- labeled Yiannopoulos 'a bigot,' but urged students opposed to his views to express their opposition 'nonviolently, in ways that do not prevent such speakers from making or completing their remarks.'
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'His modus operandi,' they wrote, 'is to bait students of color, transgender students and anyone to the left of Donald Trump in the hopes of sparking a speaking ban or physical altercation so he can pose as a free speech martyr. His campus events are one long publicity stunt designed to present himself as a kind of hip, far right, youth folk hero -- sort of Hitler Youth with cool sunglasses.'"

"As FSM participant Joel Geier describes:
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'This connection to the civil rights movement is necessary to understanding the Free Speech Movement. It wasn't just about the right of unrestricted free speech. It was about the university response to the political pressures from the capitalist establishment of California, which was trying to crack down and stop the mobilization of campus activists taking on the racist hiring practices of California corporations. It was an attempt to shut down the civil rights movement on campus that was engaging in off-campus activity that was 'illegal' by holding sit-ins against the 'legal' right of the employers not to hire Blacks.'"

"Following a demand by dozens of UC Berkeley professors to have MILO banned from the campus based on his political views, a group of Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans defended the Breitbart senior editor, criticizing those professors and students who sought to use fascist tactics in an attempt to block his speech.
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'Under the terms of [the free speech] resolution, even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus. So the UC administration was acting in accord with those principles when it refused to ban Yiannopoulos,' the group of veterans declared. 'We were thus disappointed that so many Berkeley faculty signed an open letter supporting such a ban and criticizing the UC administration for refusing to ban Yiannopoulos.'"

"Veterans of the 1960s-era Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley published an opinion piece in the Daily Californian calling Yiannopoulos a vitriol-spouting bigot who has every right to speak on campus.
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'Berkeley's free speech tradition, won through struggle -- suspension, arrest, fines, jail time -- by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos,' Robert Cohen, author of 'The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings that Changed America,' wrote Jan. 17 in the student paper.
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He cited the Berkeley faculty's Academic Senate resolution on free speech from 1964: 'The content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university.'
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'The best way to battle (Yiannopoulos') bigoted discourse is to critique and refute it,' Cohen wrote. That way, critics can 'avoid casting him in the role of free speech martyr and prove that the best cure for ignorant and hateful speech is speech that unmasks its illogic, cruelty and stupidity.'"

"'We all read Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, which was drenched in Freudian thought. And Norman O Brown was at Berkeley and Santa Cruz at this point, too… Everything was political in those days', he says, chuckling. 'It was in Marcuse, in Brown, in the Frankfurt School in general, which I was intellectually very close to. At Berkeley, remember, the head of the sociology department was Leo Lowenthal, a friend and colleague of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. There was a great linking together of psychoanalytic ideas and political ideas, and this was happening against the background of the anti-war movement, People's Park, the Free Speech Movement. It was an incredibly exciting time to be a 17, 18-year-old.'"

"Despite numerous cancellations of talks by Milo Yiannopoulos at other UC campuses and widespread opposition at UC Berkeley, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks has affirmed Yiannopoulos' right to speak on campus at a Wednesday event organized by the Berkeley College Republicans.
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In a letter released Thursday, Dirks stressed that while UC Berkeley does not endorse Yiannopoulos' controversial views or tactics, the campus would continue to uphold the values of the Free Speech Movement by sanctioning Yiannopoulos' presence and protecting his freedom of expression.
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'Our student groups enjoy the right to invite whomever they wish to speak on campus, but we urge them to consider whether exercising that right in a manner that might unleash harmful attacks on fellow students and other members of the community is consistent with their own and with our community's values,' Dirks said in the letter."

"There is a certain irony here, as the New Left began with the Free Speech movement, which opposed the common notion that the university function in loco parentis and was responsible for keeping students safe from radical ideas. There is nothing wrong with students seeking places among the like-minded--this is the purpose of fraternities and clubs. In addition, there are institutions that in my mind are appropriate, for example a Veterans center, which is certain respects can be seen as a 'safe space.' There are inherent problems, however, which should lead to such spaces being minimized. There is truth to the argument that although students need to feel physically safe, one ought not feel intellectually safe, and there is a danger that creating these spaces does inhibit the student's understanding of the 'real world.'"

"The Trump opposition should look to the Free Speech Movement (FSM) for inspiration. As one of the few successful student movements in the 1960s, FSM successfully overturned the draconian speech policies of my alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. At the time, almost all political speech was banned on campus - an incredibly strict policy for a generation that loved to speak its mind.
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To oppose the anti-liberal rules, FSM students engaged in civil disobedience, deliberately breaking the rules by tabling, handing out leaflets, and occupying administrative buildings. These acts were illegal but, instead of engaging in violence or fighting with the police, the Berkeley radicals accepted whatever punishment from the police came their way.
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Herein lies their brilliance. Because of their non-violent resistance, FSM was able to generate public sympathy because the video footage being broadcast across the nation was not of anarchy anarchists smashing windows and rioting, but rather of innocent looking youths being dragged into paddy wagons.
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In fact, one tactic that the FSM protesters brilliantly mastered was going limp, forcing police officers to physically drag them without putting up a fight. As a result of the striking footage, many sympathetic citizens and politicians began to condemn the administration.
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As California Assemblyman Willy Brown said in a speech at the time, '[T]he people in the state of California need to know that there's something seriously wrong with this university when 801 people are dragged bodily down stairs from the administration building of this university and arrested.'"

"The fact that many millennials don't understand the value of a free-speech society is most concerning. When asked, too many college students see no point in debating different points of view from a singular position taught to them in class. Those who have a need for suppression, however, only demonstrate their fears of fallibility for one side of an argument.
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More than 50 years ago, The college Free Speech Movement began with Mario Savio on the UC Berkeley campus. Yet it's ironic that today's school "speech codes" are designed to do just the opposite and amazingly, are accompanied by little student opposition.
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But reality will always win in the end and leave those who believe in oppression of free speech as victims, themselves."

"Mary graduated from Santa Barbara High School and then from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966, where she was one of the 800 students arrested in the 1964 sit-in of the Free Speech Movement. While getting a master's degree in English at San Francisco State, she joined demonstrations against the Vietnam War."

"We were thus disappointed that so many Berkeley faculty signed an open letter supporting such a ban and criticizing the UC administration for refusing to ban Yiannopoulos. The best way to battle his bigoted discourse is to critique and refute it."

"Bettina Aptheker was one of the leaders of the free speech movement at the time, some 52 years ago. On the morning of Octobter 2, 1964, she climbed on top of a police car in front of UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall and gave a speech. Aptheker was 20 at the time. In her speech, she quoted former slave Frederick Douglass, who said: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.'
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It was one of the events that launched a movement -- initially in the West, and then worldwide - for social transformation, for women's rights, civil rights, then for gay rights and later for transgender rights, a movement that is directly connected to today's students at Oberlin College."

"So it was that his scheduled speech at U.C. Davis last week devolved into a tense standoff between protesters and the police. It was called off before it could begin over security concerns.
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Later, Mr. Yiannopoulos addressed a group of supporters on the campus quad. He denounced a university culture of so-called safe spaces that he said shielded students from diverse viewpoints.
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'They cannot shut you up because you have the wrong political opinions,' he said.
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More skirmishes are expected to play out in coming appearances at the other California campuses, including a crucible of the 1960s free speech movement, U.C. Berkeley.
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Mr. Yiannopoulos was invited by the Berkeley College Republicans, a student group that portrayed the event, on Feb. 1, as a way to jolt the liberal campus with a different perspective.
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More than 100 faculty members called for blocking the event in a letter to Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. It cited a speech Mr. Yiannopoulos delivered at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he belittled a transgender student by name.
¶
'We support robust debate,' the letter said, 'but we cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation, and hate speech.'"

"Berkeley's free speech tradition, won through struggle -- suspension, arrest, fines, jail time -- by Free Speech Movement activists is far more important than Yiannopoulos, and it is that tradition's endurance that concerns us. 'The content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the university': That's what the pivotal Dec. 8 resolution says, as adopted by the Berkeley faculty's Academic Senate when it finally backed the FSM's free speech demand in 1964. Under the terms of that resolution, even the worst kind of bigot, including Yiannopoulos, must be allowed to speak on campus. So the UC administration was acting in accord with those principles when it refused to ban Yiannopoulos."

"A group of Berkeley Free Speech Movement veterans have written an open letter defending Breitbart Senior Editor MILO's right to speak while criticizing professors who have sought to have him banned from campuses around the state.
¶
Despite proclaiming a great distaste for the self-proclaimed Dangerous Faggot and describing him as a 'bigot' and 'Hitler Youth with cool sunglasses,' the group brought up their struggle and fight during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, expressing disappointment that professors at the Berkeley campus would ever want to censor a speaker based on their views."

"But RPA (Richmond Progressive Alliance) is different. It has a nucleus of seasoned activists who understand that progressive groups must reflect progressive values. For example, Mike Parker who moved to Richmond in 2008 after activist experience from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 to decades on the shop floor of Detroit. Parker knew from his long experience that winning elections did not mean that the racial dynamics of the RPA volunteer base did not have to change. The group then openly addressed the problem."

"Years later, in a classified missive, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would urge his field offices to arrest 'members of the New Left' on marijuana and other drug charges.
¶
Marijuana -- so disdained by officialdom -- had become a major symbol of protest. Legalization was not a standalone issue as it is now, said Lee, in a recent interview. It was intimately tied to antiwar protest, gay liberation, and the fight against censorship.
¶
'When a young person took his first puff of psychoactive smoke, he also drew in the psychoactive culture as a whole, the entire matrix of law and association surrounding the drug, its induction and transaction,' said Michael Rossman of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. 'One inhaled a certain way of dressing, talking, acting, certain attitudes. One became a youth criminal against the state.'"

"When asked for comment, Troy Worden of Berkeley College Republicans stated, 'The University of California, Berkeley makes a mockery of the the ideals of the Free Speech Movement by responding to the Berkeley College Republicans in so self-righteous and self-serving a letter. They belittle our efforts to work with them to provide the security they demand for our event, and then bewail the extra hours they have to put in to systematically snuff out our right to free speech. Let this much be clear: the university is imposing a comically large financial burden on our club for security that we did not request in the first place.'"

"But now there is a nascent, however subconscious or inadvertent, effort to reinstate in loco parentis. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement was met with heckling and disruption at the University of California, Berkeley.¶
....¶
But universities are not homes, administrators are not parents. University students are not children. Students should not be protected from ideas and communications that they find disturbing. Robust speech, protected by the First Amendment, often may offend or chill or disrupt the conventional wisdom. That is good. Universities should work to protect students from sexual and physical assaults and other harms. They should not be safe havens from disturbing ideas and discourses. It is one thing to condemn and quite another to censor or punish."

"Historians credit HUAC's 'Operation Abolition' with backfiring spectacularly. Young people across the country were shown the film at school, saw right through it, and decided they should make their way to Berkeley - after all, that's where all the action was. Four years later, the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement began.
¶
Let's remember this moment in history as a lesson in the power of free speech and free thought. And let's remember it as proof that if we remain vigilant, lies can wither in the face of truth.
¶
In the wake of an election season marked by fake news, open distaste for journalism, and a president-elect who lied about his own self-documented views during a nationally televised debate, let's not shy away from reflecting on our government's willingness to engage in cynical propaganda."

"On May 13, 1960, 300 protesters, most of them students from UC Berkeley, gathered at San Francisco City Hall to protest hearings that HUAC had decided to hold here. Many of the protesters gathered outside the hearing room on the second floor were clean-cut youths, and their most confrontational action was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and staging a sit-down protest. None of them could have imagined that their peaceful sit-in would end with San Francisco police blasting them with fire hoses and clubbing them - or that their protest would be one of the seminal events of what would come to be called the '60s.¶
....¶
An activist UC student organization called SLATE, formed in 1958, urged students to picket the three-day HUAC hearings, in part because the committee had subpoenaed [UC student Douglas] Wachter. On the morning of May 12, scores of students filed into City Hall and lined up to enter the hearing chamber.¶
....¶
[HUAC staff director Richard] Arens then called Wachter. The 18-year-old Berkeley High School graduate, wearing a gray suit and red tie, was a member of SLATE who had picketed with the civil rights group Congress of Racial Equality and marched against capital punishment. His parents were longtime members of the Communist Party; he was part of the party's youth group. Wachter refused to answer Arens' questions, citing his First and Fifth amendment rights.¶
After the lunch break, more students arrived from a rally at Union Square, where Assemblyman Phil Burton had told them, 'People should be tried in a legal court of law on the basis of their actions. … No legislative committee has the right to tell a man what he thinks and what he doesn't!'"

"October 1, 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which was born out of a protest in front of the school's Sproul Hall. That year, the College Fix reported, UC Berkeley's College Republicans 'illustrated how the university has actually turned its back on the First Amendment,' discarding its ideals and replacing it with a stifling culture of political correctness and intolerance."

"The courses in DeCal - short for Democratic Education at Cal - aren't graded, so there is little stress. But they count for one or two credits. And they have their roots in Berkeley's landmark free speech movement from five decades ago, when students pressed for and won greater academic rights." [Ed note: the first program was called Free University of Berkeley (1965-72?)]

"He's [Matt Ingalls is] also going to project an unexpected excerpt from [Pauline] Oliveros' 1965 'Rock Symphony,' a collage of pop music (the Beatles and Rolling Stones) and the voice of Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, tweaked with time-delay and other effects."

"And to think, when I was an undergraduate in Aggieland we looked in awe at our brothers and sisters in Berkeley who founded the Free Speech Movement, even if we had no idea what it was they were being prevented from saying.
¶
I wonder what Mario Savio would have to say about not allowing Yiannopolous to speak at one of Cal's sister campuses.
¶
Yiannopolous' lecture is free, but already it's been declared 'sold out.' I'm not sure how you can sell out something that doesn't cost anything in the first place, but I think it means all the tickets are gone.
¶
Which seems to indicate that at least someone on campus wants to hear what Yiannopoulos has to say.
¶
Interim Chancellor Ralph Hexter, proving once again that the word 'interim' should be removed from his title, addressed the controversy head on when he said, 'As a public university, we remain true to our obligation to uphold everyone's First Amendment freedoms. This commitment includes fostering an environment that avoids censorship and allows space for differing points of view. Therefore, we will not ask the Davis College Republicans to cancel their event.'"

"Mr. Vanderbur said, 'You have freedom of speech and you may express yourself within the confines of civility and law.' There is nothing in the First Amendment about civility. In 2014 on the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement, University of California Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks stated that the right to free speech 'requires that people treat each other with civility.' He had to backtrack on that when scholars became concerned that 'civility would be used as an excuse to repress legitimate political debate.'"

"It's where Allen Ginsberg loitered with Jack Kerouac while the Black Panthers had their meetings upstairs. It's where the architects of the free-speech movement argued over coffee. It's where the Telegraph Avenue streetkids in the photographs of Richard Misrach hung out. It was one of the great good places."

"Mr. Mandel was a committed activist. He walked picket lines, wrote and broadcast his views, and was an active supporter of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. In his late 40s, he was the oldest member of the Free Speech Movement's steering committee. [actually, Executive Committee]"

"The Lumberjack believes that when students here on campus assemble and protest, it must be done so with a clear message and solidarity. Too often the theme of a protest is muddied by differing messages and a lack of continuity among its participants. We don't want to give the opposition the chance to reduce a strong show of activism to a petty list of complaints or simply nullify it as irrelevant.
¶
The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement students formed the United Front and protested to express political views on campus even before protesting on campus was permissible. Although 773 students were arrested for occupying the administration building, the movement resulted in the right to use the University campus for political activity and debate."

"Their voices were heard.
¶
The Chronicle's front page from Dec. 4, 1964, covers the arrests of around 800 free-speech protesters on the UC Berkeley campus.
¶
'The University of California went through a day of crisis yesterday with mass arrests, faculty protests and massive student demonstrations,' the story read.
¶
'In all, 801 demonstrators were removed from Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus -- many of them by force -- and taken to jail,' read The Chronicle report by Michael Harris and Don Wegars. 'By late last night several hundred had been released on bail.'"

"1964 - Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest of the UC Regents' decision to forbid protests on UC property."

"Von Blum remained politically active after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by participating in anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley.
¶
When Von Blum was teaching at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, he was involved in protests that helped create ethnic studies departments at UC campuses. Once these departments were created, he moved to UCLA to teach classes on the African-American arts and culture he had become interested in during his time in the South."

"In 1964, he [Jack Weinberg] was sitting at a table on campus when a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed him about the movement, which was a struggle by students over the right to engage in political speech on campus. Weinburg said he was annoyed with the reporter for insinuating that the Communists or some other 'sinister' group must direct the students behind the scenes.
¶
What he actually said was, 'We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over 30.' He wanted the reporter to know that no one was pulling the group's strings. Weinburg, who remained an activist and has worked in such areas as Greenpeace, said he does not believe it is even the most important thing he's ever said or done, but he's known for it now. The phrase was repeated throughout the press and became a sort of mantra for a generation. Today, we would say it 'went viral,' and it would have been tweeted and retweeted and spread elsewhere on social media."

"As citizens in the US and elsewhere once again take to the streets in large numbers, reports in this book remind us of the importance of people power with articles such as Calvin Trillin's on the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Joseph Wechsberg on the Prague Spring, which of course did not end so well -- at least not until 1989. There are reflections on feminism and abortion, the Second Vatican Council, the Six-Day War and Paris 1968."

"'During Sproul Showdown Students Ready for Arrest'
¶
These are a few of the headlines published in The Daily Californian's pages in 1964, the year of the Free Speech Movement. You can now view every newspaper printed that year in our newly launched digital archive: newsprint.dailycal.org.
¶
We plan to digitize every Daily Cal issue, from the newspaper's conception in 1871 to the present day. Every week, students are scanning page after page from microfilm reels at the campus library -- a monotonous yet marvelous march through Berkeley's past."

"[Berkeley Mayor-Elect Jesse Arreguin:] 'Berkeley is a little city with a big voice, and we will continue to use it. We are a city of progressive ideals and values that resonate across different cultures. We celebrate diversity and individuality. There is a place for everyone here.
¶
From the free speech movement in the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter movement today, Berkeley has been at the epicenter of social reform. And under my Mayorship, this legacy will continue. No one is going to keep us from that path.
¶
On the contrary, this is our time to rededicate ourselves to peace, justice, equity, inclusiveness and kindness.'"

"After 60 years of service to the Berkeley community, Caffe Mediterraneum -- a historic center of counterculture movements -- will be changing ownership.
¶
In the 1950s and '60s, Caffe Mediterraneum, often referred to as The Med, was popular among members of the Beat generation, the Black Panthers and those involved in the Free Speech Movement. As first reported by Berkeleyside, the property is set to be leased to new owners who plan on remodeling the business and reopening in 2017."

"At a student rally Thursday at the University of California at Berkeley, several hundred students watched as faculty members took turns speaking.
¶
'People make choices, and choices make history. We can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders,' said Rucker Johnson, an associate professor of public policy. 'We at UC-Berkeley are a beacon of light. We are the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. We can't allow stereotyping and scapegoating to fetter us. We will uphold our traditions of speaking truth to power.'"

"On September 10, 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley. Almost no one remembers why.
¶
The University's Board of Regents had long imposed restrictions on what kinds of recruiting were possible on school property. Everyone involved in student government knew the rules. Every group had to be approved: fraternities, sororities, religious groups, and political activists. The underlying motivation, more than anything, was to restrict religious proselytizing: the church/state separation issue."

"Her [Janet Napolitano's] observations are spot-on. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of her prescription for what we should 'do about it.' Her prescription flies in the face of the ethos she claims to praise through quoting Thomas Jefferson, who, among his other accomplishments, founded the University of Virginia. Napolitano cites Jefferson's declaration that the University of Virginia 'will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.'
¶
Jefferson's maxim, she tells us, was not realized until the 'Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the mid-60s,' which 'established that the only limits on free speech should be those defined in the Constitution, at least as far as our nation's public universities were concerned.' She then asks, "Has this concept now been turned on its head?'"

"To see the magnitude of this change since 1964, imagine how Berkeley's students of 1964 would react to regulation of their Halloween costumes. They would see the Orwellian nature of this intrusion of the Administration's heavy hand -- backed by police -- into their personal lives. They might respond with mass disobedience, an orgy of incorrect costumes. They might riot."

"The process of the document's [the Port Huron Statement] adoption also manifested the ideal, for without the contributions of other SDS members, Hayden would never have gotten it right. It was they -- Haber, Bob Ross, and others -- who told him to move the 'Values' section to the top of the document, not bury it in the middle. If they had not done so, the Port Huron Statement might have gone into the dustbin of radical pamphlets rather than inspiring a generation, for its declaration of 'Values' expressed in words what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement would manifest in action two years later, and what students the nation over would identify with avidly even in the moment of opposition to the Vietnam War."

"[Roberta] Alexander said her grandfather was a slave and her father worked for the Civil Rights Congress in Oakland where he dealt with police brutality and unfair eviction of families from their homes.
¶
She said she grew up watching the Civil Rights Movement and going to demonstrations by herself in Los Angeles to support the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
¶
'It made me believe we can make a change in the world,' Alexander said.
¶
Alexander was a part of the Free Speech Movement when she attended University of California, Berkeley, then decided to join the Black Panther movement."

"The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s may be seen in retrospect as an extension of the success of the 1950s, as university enrolments and funding continued to expand, and as the social and political role of universities assumed new importance. Universities became important sites of conflict over foreign policy, racism, gender equality and democracy, both within and beyond the campus. A new ideological cosmopolitanism emerged on campus as a result of the emergence of the first serious Marxist scholarship in the US, especially through the renewal of a historical perspective in anthropology, sociology, literature and history proper. Feminists opened up new opportunities for women in academe and began to create new theory around the question of gender. Most importantly, the very purpose of academic knowledge and research was questioned, especially in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. "

"The ’60s didn’t begin in 1960—or so the conventional history of the counterculture would have it. It wasn’t until 1964 and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the story goes, that authority was seriously questioned. But tear your gaze away from those photogenic kids and consider these three books published in 1961, 1962, and 1963: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Silent Spring, and The Feminine Mystique. All three books were written by women who were well beyond their college years, and all three transformed the world more lastingly than any protest. The third, by Betty Friedan, kicked off second-wave feminism. The second, by Rachel Carson, launched the environmental movement. And as for the first: If you have chosen an American city for your home, Jane Jacobs made the world you live in—although it might be more accurate to say that she saved it."

"In the 1960s, as a lawyer, Brown defended Mario Savio who was the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement. Willie knows the importance of the freedom of the press and he is the perfect choice to speak on the 1956 Commemoration in San Francisco." [Ed note: In March, 1964, a half year before the FSM, Brown represented some of those arrested in the SF Sheraton Palace demonstrations. Following the FSM, Brown contributed as a speaker and to fundraising efforts.]

"I have a philosophy that one should leave a place better then one found it. The relationship between the university administration and students historically has certainly evolved, just as the university itself has evolved from its foundations to present. If one goes back several decades, there have been times when students have felt in direct opposition to the administration. This uneasy relationship indirectly led to the birth of the Free Speech Movement on our campus and the heritage of vibrant activism that continues to define the Berkeley experience."

"The modern student movement was born out of students' desire to be treated as adults. When the Free Speech Movement began at the University of Berkeley in 1964, the demand to lift the Red-scare restrictions on political activism was bound up with the demand to lift in loco parentis itself - to have total autonomy over their social as well as intellectual lives. That then California governor Ronald Reagan would later lambast revolting Berkeley students as 'communist sympathisers, protesters and sex deviants' was no accident. Political dissidence and sexual depravity were seen as intimately related."

"In his introduction, Stephen Shames remembers his engagement with the movement: 'In 1966, I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. One of my roommates, Marty Roysher, had been on the steering committee of the Free Speech Movement the year before. With his guidance I became active in student government and the anti-Vietnam War movement. In August 1967, after a summer job at a plastics factory, I hitchhiked to the East Village of New York City. I bought my first camera during the Summer of Love. When I returned to Berkeley in September, I realized I was not suited for the endless meetings and bickering of politics. My contribution to the movement would be as a photographer. Documenting the Black Panthers became my first long-term project.'"

"'To me, freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is... that's what marks us off from the stones and stars.' These are words spoken by Mario Savio, the spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement in the 60's. Decades later, the power of free speech has surged onto the global stage and began reclaiming the dignity of humanity.
¶
We are now entering WikiLeaks 10 year anniversary. The organization registered their domain on October 4, 2006 and blazed into the public limelight in the spring of 2010 with the publication of Collateral Murder. This video footage depicted the cruel scenery of modern war seen from an Apache helicopter gun-sight. It became an international sensation, with the website temporarily crashing with the massive influx of visitors."

"While creating a stampede for no good reason isn't protected speech, the Supreme Court decision which birthed that cliched analogy was actually about restricting the free speech of anti-war socialists during World War I-which is the kind of speech Napolitano seemingly would support the protection of, especially considering she evokes the anti-Vietnam War Free Speech Movement of the 1960s in this op-ed." [Ed note: and this is how untruths are propagated. Napolitano should know that the 1964 Free Speech Movement was formed to counter campus restriction on organizing for the Civil Rights Movement. The Vietnam War issue came later.]

"In the 1960s, as exemplified by the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, students on campuses demanded and received the ability to protest the Vietnam War. [Ed note: FSM was supporting the civil rights movement, not opposing the Vietnam War.] This was free speech, loud and angry and in your face. Today many of the loudest voices condemning speech and demanding protection are students on those same campuses. Listening to offensive, or merely opposing, views is subject to frequent criticism. What has happened, and what are we to do about it?
¶....¶
Wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, a year after founding the University of Virginia, 'This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.'
¶
But freedom of speech has had a bumpy ride at American universities, echoing our country's uneven interpretation of the First Amendment. In 1900, for example, Jane Stanford, the benefactor of Stanford University, forced the firing of a faculty member in large part because he supported labor unions. Not until the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the mid-60s was the principle established that the only limits on free speech should be those defined in the Constitution, at least as far as our nation's public universities were concerned. Has this concept now been turned on its head?"

"Snodgrass's undergraduate education began at Reed College.
¶
'All I can say is I was a mediocre student grade-wise,' Snodgrass said. He went on to graduate school, first at the University of Maryland and then at UC Berkeley. Yet it wasn't his science that got him a teaching position at Berkeley.
¶
'I ended up being invited back to Berkeley to teach, not because I was a good scientist but because I was politically active and so was the department. I was one of the 'student leaders' of the free-speech movement,' Snodgrass said. He even spent some time in jail after occupying the administration building.
¶
'I'm actually very proud of that,' Snodgrass said."

"It is October 1964, Berkley. A student protest has just been launched on the campus of University of California.
¶
The protest comes in response to the sudden termination of any venue for on-campus political advocacy by the university officials. During a time when awareness and passion for civil rights flew high among the student body, the move was taken as a direct threat to freedom. Initiated by left leaning [Ed note: left to right coalition] students, the Free Speech Movement would have long-lasting effects on Berkley as well as other places where students had now come to realise the potential of demonstration. As the movement grew further, and involved a massive sit-in, speeches made by students, the arrest of almost 800; the university finally conceded to the students' demands, and the ban"

"You needn't dig deep to uncover the stinking heap of ironies infesting this deplorable episode. Of course, UC Berkeley is the famed birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, a series of protests in 1964-65 aimed at securing students' right to undertake political activity on campus.
¶....¶
Aside from the rest, it's a reminder that it was Berkeley students who drove the Free Speech Movement, earning the school widespread esteem for its embrace of that liberty, in the face of fierce opposition from its administration. Their contribution was to call the cops."

"Our legacy as UC Berkeley students is to carry on this emblem of the movement, our responsibility to enact the freedoms that students before us fought to protect. The conservative versus liberal clash has always existed in the microcosm of Berkeley, reflecting the larger division in this nation. Republican Ronald Reagan was largely able to guarantee his successful election as California governor by promising to quell the future uprising of liberal student activism.
¶....¶
'On one hand, administration will take down flyers that are deemed offensive, and on the other hand, administration turns a blind eye to repeated, targeted attacks on a particular group,' said [Berkeley College Republicans' External Vice President Claire] Chiara. 'The absolute hypocrisy of condemnation of free expression at the very home of the Free Speech Movement is frightening.'
¶....¶
The students before us fought for our freedom of speech, so let's use it to create productive discourses that will aid us as the next generation of UC Berkeley students who strive for social reformation. Let's take the story back."

"Inspired by Martin Luther King, blacks and whites protested segregation and racism with marches, sit ins, and other forms of non-violent actions that birthed the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of '64, called 'Freedom Summer,' some students from UCB traveled to the south to assist with voter registration for Blacks who had been denied the right to vote. Three young Civil Rights workers, men from the north, were killed there. That fall, the Chancellor of the UCB campus clamped down on students' rights to set up informational tables about Civil Rights, as well as the Vietnam War, on the campus.
¶
Thus the rise of FSM, where 800 students sat down in Sproul Hall, Administration Building, in a peaceful protest. Because of my location on the hallway floor, I was the last person dragged by my collar to the booking room on Dec. 4.
¶
Before boarding a bus that would take us to Santa Rita Prison, the press stopped me for comment. I responded, 'This is just the beginning. We will not give up until we win'
¶
That statement was circulated in newspapers all over the county; my husband's grandmother in Rancho Santa Fe, California, read it and disinherited him. The important thing for both of us was that I did the right thing, not the loss of an inheritance. Neither I, nor any of my friends who were arrested, were ever communists. Rather, we were idealists who felt the call to help our fellow humans. And we did win. Due to overwhelming faculty support, the ban on political tables was overturned."

"In 1964 the aim of the protests had been to remove the last barriers on 'unrestricted' free speech. Savio was always explicit about this. Fifty years later, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, sent a public letter to faculty, students and staff advising how best to honour the spirit of the Free Speech Movement. They should always remember that they live in a diversely constituted 'community' where a standard of 'respect' was a precondition of 'safe' use of the privilege of free speech. Above all, they must take care not to speak with unseemly passion:
¶
When issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation … We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this sense, free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin - the coin of open, democratic society.
¶
Reduced to a practical directive, the first sentence says: 'Indulge in free speech if you must; but please avoid issues that are controversial; and if you do address such issues, don't sound as if you care about them intensely.' This is what Mill meant by 'quiet suppression'."

"Student-led courses at Cal come from a long tradition of student-led academic inquiry hailing back to Berkeley's Free Speech Movement itself. By reinstating the course, Cal is ultimately moving to protect the right of students to speak and study freely."

"Countless reminders of the Free Speech Movement mark our campus -- from the Mario Savio steps to the FSM Cafe -- forcing us to reflect on the principles of a movement driven by students from both ends of the political spectrum. Although often remembered as a liberal push, the Free Speech Movement was an attempt to provide all students a chance to politically engage on campus."

"Attending UC Berkeley in the 1960s was unbelievably educational. I arrived at Berkeley in September 1964, just in time for the Free Speech Movement. For several weeks I was a passive observer, although I sided with the students who had been (unfairly and unwisely, in my opinion) suspended. Then a friend, Richard Shavitz, called me and told me he was joining the sit-in at Sproul Hall. I went there too, and decided to be part of the sit-in. I expected to be arrested, and I was. The next morning the police 'invaded' the building. I was arrested, dragged down the steps of Sproul (I vividly recall my main worry: that I would lose a shoe!), taken to the Oakland jail, and released on bail the next morning. I was ultimately convicted of trespassing, failure to disperse, and resisting arrest. This was the first of the large number of sit-ins that took place at major universities over the subsequent years.
¶
The details comprise a rather long story. I learned a tremendous amount that I could never have learned academically (such as seeing the courage and leadership exercised by the leaders, many of whom had been on freedom-rides in the South, and had witnessed police brutality firsthand). Afterwards, I met a young woman who considered me to be a hero, and on September 3rd of this year we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. (Yes, we got married young!)
¶
If you've seen the black and white photos taken inside Sproul during the sit-in, odds are that they were taken by me; very few taken by others ever became public. I attach one that shows the police charging up to the second floor in a (successful) attempt to take control of the window that was being used to supply food and information to those of us inside. For more photos, see my web page: Muller's Free Speech Photos."

"Though Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement came before the 1966-70 period highlighted in the exhibit, it's well known for sparking many of the U.S. movements featured in the show, says exhibit co-curator Victoria Broackes, who stopped at UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement Café in July as part of a press tour of the San Francisco Bay Area's counterculture landmarks.
¶
'Through the activities of its young people, Berkeley became the epicenter of various protest movements, including the anti-Vietnam-War movement, which unified nearly all protest groups of the time,' she adds. 'So much of the '60s change in the USA stemmed from Berkeley.'"

"We go to the steps of the University of California at Berkeley's Sproul Hall, where Mario Savio, spokesman for the free speech movement, made his astoundingly passionate speech inspiring his fellow students to stage a sit-in and stop 'the operation of the machine'. The free speech protests marked a direct link from the civil rights movement, in which Savio had participated, to the anti-war protests that would convulse Berkeley at the end of the 60s; just as the Beatniks of the previous decade, such as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, had profoundly influenced the hippies."

"Gleason split with Ramparts in 1967, the same year he cofounded the Monterey Pop Festival. Later that year, he also cofounded Rolling Stone magazine and gave it early credibility within the music industry. If that's all he ever did, Ralph J. Gleason would be a notable figure. But he was also a leading jazz critic, cofounded the Monterey Jazz Festival, wrote the liner notes for Lenny Bruce's comedy albums, testified for the defense at Bruce's San Francisco obscenity trial, and became the only music journalist to land on President Nixon's Enemy List. When Gleason died in 1975, Greil Marcus wrote his obituary for the Village Voice. 'Ralph was always open to anything new," Marcus wrote, "not merely open to it but eager to fight for it, as he fought for Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce, the Free Speech Movement, Rock 'n' Roll, the San Francisco Sound, the Fillmore Auditorium when San Francisco was ready to close it down.'"

"During the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, he acted as an advocate for students on campus and served on a faculty committee supporting the cause. He also fought to remove a mandatory retirement rule requiring university faculty members to retire by a certain age, allowing faculty members to continue working and conducting research at the university."

"Still, the troglodytes came after her. And though she had stood up to police and political pressure as a leader of the Berkley Free Speech Movement in the 1960s and she defeated Religious Right nutcase Lou Sheldon and his Traditional Values Coalition as President of the L. A. Unified School District, defending science teacher Dr. Virginia Uribe's dropout prevention program Project 10--Jackie [Goldberg] cried as anti-gay legislators hurled slurs at her and her beloved partner, poet Sharon Stricker. Their capacity for snickering cruelty was beyond understanding."

"This defiance of image and societal expectations bleeds into the local culture, crystallizing on Telegraph Avenue, while our defiance of administrative silencing in the 1964 Free Speech Movement is now something that is institutionally celebrated."

"After I found my seat on the stage, my friend, Mara Keisling, managed to get this photo of me from her seat. I was sitting right in front of the California delegation, which included one of the loudest group of Sanders' supporters. While I do appreciate their enthusiasm, I have to admit that I found them to be very disrespectful of many speakers. One of the key lessons of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (1964-1965) is that while you have the right to free speech, you should exercise it responsibly."

"Anne [Roberts] organized another program in 1984, a 20th-year celebration of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, which began the year after we came to Albany [NY] from UC Berkeley. She attracted one of her former professors from Berkeley to participate, a Chaucer specialist, Charles Muscatine, who had been active in the Free Speech Movement and revision of the new curriculum at Berkeley. She also invited Sheldon Wolin, a prominent UC Berkeley political scientist, who was now teaching on the east coast. Anne also included several faculty members at Albany who had been at Berkeley for the panel discussions on the Free Speech Movement which she called 'Berkeley Revisited: The Impact of the 1964 Movement.' Our eldest son, James, had just graduated from UC Berkeley, and he was also part of the panel on what Berkeley was like in 1984. It was a well-attended and most stimulating event."

"The East Bay has a long history of inspiring musicians like Too Short, Tupac Shakur, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Metallica, along with birthing the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, and the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club."

"Walden, VT - Over a half a century ago Americans of all political persuasions were in the forefront of defending and expanding First Amendment protections for all citizens. In Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement overturned a campus ban on political speech. In the courts, lawyers were successful in persuading judges to strike down numerous statutes for violating the First Amendment, including prohibitions against flag burning and wearing black arm bands, and laws which punished people, like members of the Communist Party, who held dissenting views."

"Even as the Morrill Acts created a higher education system for that purpose, Morrill and other state legislatures stressed the importance of maintaining the liberal arts and humanities. This mandate for a hybrid student -- both an industrious worker and developed thinker -- continued well past the 1860s and has defined much of the conflict over higher education's governance.
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Nowhere was this duality clearer than in the radical student movements of the 1960s. At the University of California Berkeley, President Clark Kerr gained notoriety for his declaration that education should serve the needs of future employers:
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The university is being called upon to educate previously unimaginable numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before . . . What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile did for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.
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Student activists took issue with Kerr's instrumentalism and launched the Free Speech Movement. Angered over the focus on profit and business, student leaders like Mario Savio argued that the university must transform itself into a more humane body that better reflected the ideals of free speech and political freedom:
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[If] this [university] is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
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Savio's sentiments -- and the broader historical tension over the role of American public higher education -- remind us that schemes like Bet on a Boiler, while new and insidious, don't represent a fundamental break from some halcyon past. The prerogatives of capital have always been integral to the public academy."

"It was during the early 1960s that the generational idea first began to crystalise. And you can see that in the development of the self-conscious proclamations of student groups. You see it in SNCC in the South, you can see it in SDS, which itself was originally a branch of an adult organisation until it became clear there were generational cleavages, which weren't just arguments about Communism, but about matters of style and culture - matters, that is, which were more important to us than to them. And, by 1964, you can see it in the emergence of the mass student uprising known as the Free Speech Movement.
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Admittedly, the generational nature of FSM was partly exaggerated, thanks, in the main, to a journalist's decision to present 'we don't trust anyone over 30' as the FSM's core sentiment. This was an almost wilful misunderstanding of what one of the FSM leaders had said when responding to a question about whether there were any Communists in the FSM. It was something like 'Communists are old, and we're new - we don't trust anyone over 30'. But, even so, there was semi-truth inside the misunderstanding. That is, the revolt within the university was a revolt against old institutions and old assumptions about the ability and the right of the powerful to make fundamental decisions about what constituted acceptable university life."

"In the Fall of 1964, administration officials at UC Berkeley banned students from participating in political activities on campus. In response, students from across the political spectrum protested, sat-in, risked arrest and their academic careers, in what is now known as the Free Speech Movement (FSM). The victories won by Jack Weinberg, Brian Turner, Michael Rossman, Bettina Aptheker, Mario Savio, and others in the FSM are in large part, why college campuses remain a place where students can engage in rigorous debate of any topic. Now however, much of what these activists worked for may be at risk."

"Berkeley Sit-In
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Police removed a student from Sproul Hall where students were holding an all-night sit-in at U.C. Berkeley in 1964. The demonstration was the culmination of one of the most seminal protests of the Free Speech Movement, after a student was arrested for handing out information on civil rights on campus. Nearly 800 students were arrested as part of the sit-in, but the university ultimately voted to end all restrictions on political activity."

"Seminars for registered conventioneers will be held on the mornings of Wednesday and Thursday, July 6 and 7. Topics include suffrage memorabilia, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and its consequences, the origins and legacy of the SDS, and more."

"Two other openly gay women -- Christine Kehoe and Jackie Goldberg (a veteran of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s) -- joined them in the fight for domestic partnership laws that would benefit gay men and women. The doc suggests aptly that their victories helped to pave the way for the 2015 Supreme Court decision validating same-sex marriage."

"Sim [Van der Ryn]: Yeah, and I was involved in the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Then in '65 to '66 I was appointed to an advisory committee on student housing. That's when the People's Park property came up. The University had leveled the old structures and said, you know, we want to build an extension to the medical school on that site. I looked at the regents' minutes; there were no plans to build anything there."

"'What is behind the right's appeals to 'free speech', what do socialists say about the right to free speech, and how do we best confront the Right wing, today?' reads a flyer which has been posted around DePaul campus along with a picture of Yiannopoulos and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump at the top. 'Join the DePaul Socialists for a discussion following a presentation by longtime revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. A founding member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and a lifelong revolutionary, Joel is currently an editor of the International Socialist Review.'"

"Born in New York in 1917, Gleason moved to San Francisco in 1947, and his adopted home proved crucial to forming his sensibility and to his attunement to the times. He wrote of experiencing the 'San Francisco Renaissance,' calling the city 'the Liverpool of the United States.' He was also present for the outburst of a new political culture, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, in late 1964, with its famous sit-in, the climactic speech by Mario Savio, and what Gleason called its Black Thursday, when the police stormed in-'the adult tragedy whose most macabre moment came when the policeman slammed his arm against Mario Savio's throat, not only to remove him from the stage but to keep him from speaking.'
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In the prescient essay 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' from 1965, Gleason says that 'the revision of morality and the priorities of society that are evolving-and which the Berkeley FSM movement represents-first broke through the surface of social apathy in the form of folk singers like Joan Baez.' He adds that Baez and Bob Dylan 'are the two leading figures in this crusade for a New Morality.'"

"The uprising at Berkeley climaxed in Savio's fiery speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, where he denounced the university administration. Of the 4000 protestors in Sproul Plaza, 800 were arrested. That demonstration embodied the essence of 1960s activism: it challenged, rebuked, and curtailed authority in the pursuit of freedom and equality; it did not demand, as happens too often today, that authority be expanded to create special protections for groups reductively defined as weak or vulnerable or to create buffers to spare sensitive young feelings from offense. The progressive 1960s, predicated on assertive individualism and the liberation of natural energy from social controls, wanted less surveillance and paternalism, not more."

"These incidents, and there are many more, show how Red Ken has long gone out of his way to provoke and offend Jews. But, in the present case, he claims to be defending historical truth, which - he says - he has taken from a book by a Trotskyist author called Lenni Brenner, who happens to have been brought up as an orthodox Jew.
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When I heard Ken cite Brenner, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. Berkeley had known him as Lenny Glaser -- he was using his stepfather's name -- and he had been a mind-opening and mind-blowing precursor to the Free Speech Movement."

"Civil disobedience was likewise the tactic of choice for University of California students in the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Outside 10 Downing Street in 1984 as Thatcher met with Botha, civil disobedience in the form of a sit-down strike in defiance of British police was the method we used. Ultimately, in its own small way, it appears to have worked rather well."

"Two years ago, the University of California Berkeley was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement, often credited with kicking off the modern era of campus activism. Romanticizing the Berkeley free speech movement too much is a mistake, but by the standards of contemporary campus activism even the use of the term 'free speech' is laudable. However, I have my doubts that twenty-first-century Berkeley agrees.
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To mark the anniversary, U.C. Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent out a memo that read, 'As we honor this turning point in our history, it is important that we recognize the broader social context required in order for free speech to thrive.' You can probably tell where this is heading. Dirks went on to say, 'Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so.'"
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[Ed note: The FSM Archives rebutted Dirks: http://www.dailycal.org/2014/09/16/boundary-free-speech-political-advocacy/
"It is precisely the right to speech on subjects that are divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings that we fought for in 1964."]

"In the days of Mario Savio (check out his speech on YouTube) and the Free Speech Movement, hundreds of students became involved because the president of the university, Clark Kerr -- backed by Gov. Edmund G. 'Pat' Brown and California conservatives -- announced they no longer were allowed to use speech to advocate for any political cause, position, religion or any other point of view on the campus."

"These came to a head in March 1968 when rambunctious Mark Rudd threw a lemon meringue pie at a Selective Service official, challenging the American war machine and draft rules. Next month, SDS and the Student Afro-American Society led the occupation of campus buildings in protest of Harlem expansion. Hundreds participated in the protests spearheaded by Rudd, Harvey Blume, and other activist leaders. Meanwhile, students debated and eventually agreed upon a specific set of demands, knowing that salient policy change had come from past student demonstrations like UC Berkeley's 1964 Free Speech Movement."

"The early New Left-as exemplified by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Free Speech Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the women's movement-was in many ways a response to the situation Ginsburg and Marcuse described. Convinced that the personal was political, many in the New Left placed individual needs and experience at the center of their activism and emphasized participatory democracy. These projects-along with casual dress, drug experimentation, long hair, sexual freedom, and an explosion of new music-militated against the dominant culture. Even as the wave of the '60s separated into two currents-one more political and the other more countercultural-it never stopped pushing individual liberation. This feature of the New Left has led otherwise astute observers such as Mark Lilla and the late Tony Judt to ignore the movement's organized and disciplined commitment to social justice and to reduce the '60s to an era of do-your-own-thing individualism."

"The Free School movement evolved from the Free Speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1960s. By the mid-1970s dozens of free schools and universities were operating in the United States."

"The Free Speech Movement began during the 1964-65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and spread like wildfire throughout higher education.
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The Free Speech Movement led to an explosion of dialogue and intellectual give-and-take on campuses and academic freedom for faculty reigned supreme."

"Her odd conflation of the Free Speech Movement with the 'freedom' to harass others points to a fundamental misdiagnosis. It is not 'respect' as opposed to 'freedom' that has finally brought to light sexual harassment on our campus, but the courageous, persistent struggles of survivors and their allies despite obstacles at every turn. Hesse should demonstrate real commitment to these survivors, not undermine them by urging us all to be 'respectful.'"

"Was it 'respect' that kept the Free Speech Movement from becoming the Filthy Speech Movement? Did that 'respect' take the form of adhering to administrative honor codes? What exactly is the freedom she is talking about, and how does it relate to the many formulations, experiments and calls for freedom which exist on and around the campus? There is a complete stifling and immobilization of the very difficult active engagements with questions of transgression, and dismissal of the kinds of care and caution which a developing sensitivity to these engagement can engender. Where will the meaning of those words in the honor code - honesty, integrity, respect - be discussed, explored, weighed and put into practice? How do we come to recognize injustices that did not appear as such to us before?"

"'It's been frustrating, watching the sort of speech [suppression] shift over from administrators to students,' [Greg] Lukianoff told U.S. News & World Report.
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The magazine also quoted Bettina Aptheker, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in the mid-1960s, which argued for students' rights to engage in political activity on campus and for academic freedom. The movement helped propel both civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests on campuses nationwide. Aptheker said she also worries about recent trends."

"Although, as veterans of the Free Speech Movement, we are gratified that at least one UC Berkeley ambassador sees its importance as a defining moment in campus history, we are writing to correct the errors that this ambassador makes in describing the Free Speech Movement on campus tours. The Free Speech Movement was a nonviolent protest against the campus's closing down of the one place on campus (the Bancroft Way-Telegraph Avenue strip) where students were allowed to advocate for political causes, pass out literature, recruit members and raise money for political and social action. It was motivated largely by concerns about civil rights, not about the Vietnam War, which was still not on the radar of most Americans. There was no chaining of doors to any building - that was an event that happened years later - and no keeping the chancellor from his office. After a semester of fruitless negotiations, the struggle culminated in a massive sit-in at Sproul Hall, the arrests of almost 800 students and a faculty vote supporting the student demands. The resulting rules still prevail on campus: The campus shall make no regulations restricting the content of speech or advocacy, and the time, place and manner of political activities shall be regulated only so far as to prevent interference with the normal functioning of the campus.Our hope is that both those who train campus tour guides - and the guides themselves - will prepare by studying the history of the Free Speech Movement so as to give those who tour the campus an accurate account of this event and its importance in the struggle for a freer campus and a society free of racism. We would be happy to meet with UC Berkeley ambassadors to help them better understand this history."

"'DC: What is your favorite part of giving a tour?
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BB [Becca Berelson]: I love talking about the Free Speech Movement. I think it's just one of the most defining aspects of Cal history that's shaped who we are as a current campus and our current campus climate. So I get super passionate when I talk about it just because I think it's beautiful.
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DC: Could you elaborate on the Free Speech Movement a little more?
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BB: Yeah, so in 1964 there was a lot going on in politics with the Vietnam War, etc. - and the students really wanted to be able to talk about free speech and have free speech on campus: demonstrations, protests - that sort of thing. And the administration wasn't really having it, so what the students did was one night, they chained together the doors of California Hall. And this was a big problem because this was the office of the chancellor at the time and at that time they didn't have Google Drive or anything, so he really needed his office to be able to run the school. So, it was a really big deal. The university retaliated, there was a police force - all this crazy stuff going on. There are really famous pictures of Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement, standing atop this police car talking about free speech. It's just totally affected who we are. Cal students tend to be pretty passionate and activists and really driven. We're just committed to social issues, aware of politics and current events - which I think is a really beautiful thing. I think that without the Free Speech Movement, we might not be like that or have that reputation as much."
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[Ed note: it was civil rights, not ant-war activism, which precipitated the FSM. 10/1/1964 police drove car onto Sproul Plaza to arrest former student Jack Weinberg. 12/2/1964 over 1000 students occupied Sproul Hall. 12/3/1964 almost 800 are arrested. The basic issue: the content of speech or advocacy should not be restricted by the University. 12/8/1964 The Faculty Senate agreed. The FSM prevailed.]

"In his introduction to Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus, Tom Slater -- deputy editor of online magazine spiked and coordinator of its Free Speech University Rankings -- looks back to the 1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, when 'students demanded to be taken seriously as autonomous beings, capable of negotiating their academic, political and social lives away from the tutelage of their tweeded minders'."

"Let's be honest. Freedom is great, but we have a very hard time talking about any other public values at UC Berkeley -- like respect. But if we are going to succeed in producing a campus environment in which every one of our members can enjoy the personal safety and social dignity that are preconditions for freedom, we are going to have to learn how to embrace the virtue of respect for those who are different and of those with whom we disagree.
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Without respect, the Free Speech Movement becomes the Filthy Speech Movement. Free love becomes harassment and even assault. UC Berkeley needs to find a way to stand up more firmly and more forcefully for the virtue of putting limits on our own behavior so that the opportunities that freedom affords are a privilege of every member of our community, and not just those of the most privileged members of our community."

"Alameda Island Brewing Company, 1716 Park St., is hosting an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday for photographer Howard Harawitz. 'The '60s: Through the Lens of Howard Harawitz' is on display this month and next at the brewery.
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Harawitz' images were recently featured in the film 'The Black Panthers Vanguard of the Revolution,' which aired on PBS. He photographed and participated in the Bay Area's civil rights, peace and the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s."

"Henry went back to college, this time to the University of Wisconsin, where he discovered left-wing politics and changed his major from journalism to political science. Upon completion of his undergraduate studies, he moved to Berkeley for graduate work. There he met and married Evelyn Gins, and recognized that a proper career was the appropriate next step. He graduated from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1952. After a few years as a solo practitioner, he joined Fred Howell in a thriving practice serving the Berkeley community. Henry and his partners set up small business corporations, represented individuals in personal injury cases, appealed death penalty decisions, wrote wills and trusts, and litigated divorces. Henry spent many pro bono hours representing student protesters during the Free Speech Movement."

"ALAMEDA -- The date was Oct. 1, 1964, and change was about to erupt on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.
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Graduate student and civil rights activist Jack Weinberg was arrested by campus police for refusing to show his identification. Students surrounded the patrol car where Weinberg was being held and remained in place for hours as a show of defiance.
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Charges against Weinberg were dropped and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was born.
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Weinberg's friend, Howard Harawitz, was in the crowd that day and began taking photos to document the event. Harawitz went on to photograph many of the protests that were so much a part of the Bay Area's activist climate 50 years ago."

"At the height of the student free speech movement Aptheker had been invited to speak at Ohio State University. To demonstrate the absurdity of the school's crackdown on free expression, Aptheker sat on stage silently while students challenged campus-based censorship by reading excerpts from his many books - all found in the school's library.
However, it wasn't only Aptheker's passion that endeared him to sixties-era young radicals or to African Americans looking to challenge the then-dominant narrative about Blacks in U.S. history."

"By coincidence, tonight I'm up at Berkeley, staying a short walk away from Sather Gate, the scene of the beginning of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. That famous eruption began because of . . . university restrictions on the places where students could put up card tables and engage in political messaging. Now students and weak-minded administrators like [Ajay] Nair want to crack down on political speech, but only when it is politically unacceptable speech. It would be one thing if 'chalking' were prohibited campus wide, but this is clearly just a bureaucratic hedge to clamp down on speech the left doesn't like. Would Nair make this same statement if campus Republicans objected to someone chalking 'Sanders 2016'? Don't make me laugh."

"Perhaps unsurprisingly, the opponents of free speech have historically been on the right side of the ideological spectrum. Whether it was the suppression of slavery abolitionists prior to the Civil War, the Palmer Raids of 1920, the arrests of union organizers, McCarthyism, or the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) in the 1960s, free speech has historically been something that liberals have stood for, fought for and died for."

"Nicoletta Commings and Sofie Karasek were drawn to UC Berkeley for its social justice traditions. Karasek read about the free-speech movement in history class at her high school in Massachusetts and wrote her college application essay about her desire to pursue environmental activism there. She arrived on campus for the fall term in 2011, just in time to join hundreds of protesters in Sproul Plaza who were supporting the Occupy movement for economic equality.
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'It was everything I wanted,"' she said.
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But after being sexually assaulted by fellow students, Karasek and Commings said, they were shocked that administrators seemed disinterested in their complaints, failed to keep them informed about their investigations and levied what they view as inadequate sanctions. They and a third woman are suing the university over the handling of their cases.
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The university has denied the allegations."

"Read or watch Mario Savio's speech at Sproul Hall in 1964 during the Berkley Free Speech Movement. Ask yourself what has changed. Savio asks us to consider that if the educational institution is a capitalist operation, then the faculty are the employees and the students are the raw material to be commodified and translated into capital for the institution. He courageously asserts, 'We're human beings!' Savio continues to galvanize the crowd, 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! … And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus-and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it-that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"

"'The claim that the FSM was fighting for free speech for all (i.e., the First Amendment) was always a charade,' according to journalist Sol Stern, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute who, back in the day, was a member of the FSM at Berkeley, where it was born. 'Within weeks of FSM's founding, it became clear to the leadership that the struggle was really about clearing barriers to using the campus as a base for radical political activity.'"

"The Berkeley Free Speech Movement served as a crucial milestone in the US struggle for civil liberties. Although the din around the Kumar arrest is dying down, this could well be the start of India's own movement. Will those who label critics 'anti-national' prevail, or will free speech advocates who contend it is patriotic to try to make the country better through peaceful criticism of state policies, win the day?"

"She was born in the city, raised in Palo Alto along with early members of the Grateful Dead, attended Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, rode the bus with the Merry Pranksters, and much more.
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....
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Then I got to Berkeley and all the tables were set up in the Plaza and everyone was handing out their political information. I was seventeen, a freshmen and took every ier. In a few weeks the campus police came and con scated the tables. That started the Free Speech Movement. I was active in that from the very get go. I got arrested at Sproull Hall. I got beaten up by the police and taken to the Oakland City Jail. That whole fall semester was pretty luminous because of the Free Speech Movement."

"I thought all the excitement about Berkeley during Welcome Week would die off after the first few weeks of class, but it really didn't. Throughout Fall 2014 the campus was socially aflame with two big events: the Black Lives Matter movement and the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. These generated an excitement at Berkeley like I've never seen before and affected my experience as a student daily."

"Two prestigious universities dominate higher education in the Bay Area and possibly the rest of the nation and beyond. Both UC Berkeley and Stanford are ultra-selective powerhouses, churning out graduates, fresh ideas and social revolutions. Think of Silicon Valley and the Free Speech Movement, for starters."

"Barthol, the original bass player for 'The Fish,' and long-time music director for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, takes the audience on an odyssey both political and physical. As the child of academics his family bounced around from Berkeley to Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, Spain, and finally landing him in Berkeley on the eve of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) in 1964."

"In 1960, student activism hit the campus of the famed University of California, Berkeley. The motivation behind the Berkeley protests were civil rights for African-Americans, the free speech movement and anti-war (Vietnam) protests. All in all, the protests were in the nature of a counter-cultural movement.
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The Berkeley protests find an eerie echo in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) saga. The apparent catalysts have been the demonstrations on the anniversary of Afzal Guru's hanging, and then these devolved into other ancillary protest themes."

"It doesn't completely place the Panthers in the context of the times, and of antiwar, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-establishment militancy that flourished in the Bay Area, Free Speech Movement and various other countercultural movements in the Bay Area. It was an time when some hoped and others feared that revolution -- a word as inflammatory as it was inexact -- was coming to America. Both sides were readying for actual war."

"ACTIVISTS: We try to be as active as possible in things like the Black Lives Matter movement. I think we're all pretty into Bernie Sanders. We try to make our shows and music an inclusive and safe space for everyone, because I think a lot of times when you don't overtly state that, it can become unsafe and uncomfortable for marginalized people. We don't want anybody to feel excluded from our music because, in the end, it's something that helps people and makes them happy. Why exclude people from that? I think that [mindset] comes from growing up in the East Bay and the Berkeley punk scene. We were pretty influenced by the 'pre-hippie' ideology and free speech movement. We've always just known you pick your friend up if they fall down in the mosh pit. You have all-ages shows and you don't spread hate."

"The writers in The People Make the Peace represent different political trends. Alex Hing, for example, was a self-described revolutionary nationalist. He recalls his development from Chinatown poverty, to San Francisco's Free Speech Movement and SCLC Poor People's Campaign, to the Red Guard Party (formed by the Black Panthers), and finally his union activism with the Hotel workers. He traveled through Vietnam and Korea, and as part of the first U.S. delegation to visit China since the 1949 revolution led by Mao Zedong."

"Learning to print was a political act. Other such pioneers of the New Left included David Lance Goines' small shop for Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964; Glad Day Press in Ithaca, New York and Peace Press in Los Angeles (1967); and Chicago's Salsedo Press and Red Sun in the Boston area (1973). Of those, only Salsedo and Red Sun remain. But other shops, such as Brooklyn's Radix Media, continue this noble trade. And the graphic design department of Inkworks, which spun off in 2002, is now the Design Action Collective, a very successful visual communications business in Oakland."

"Waters said even farmers thought she was crazy, but her conviction was unyielding. It came from the free speech movement in Berkeley.
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'I thought that I could do anything I wanted to do. I just had to be determined enough to do it,' Waters said.
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With that willpower she learned how to cook, all from a cookbook."

"This is a true story of a young boy who lived in a cave with his grand parents in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and who later finds himself on a path of exciting discovery and learning. Traveling from New York to the mid western city of Lawrence, Kansas, then Fresno and Berkeley in California, he actually witnesses the turbulence on this campus and offers his reflections on the significance of the free speech movement. After he completes his higher education, he travels back east to begin an extraordinary professional career at the United Nations. In the course of his long journey, the young man learns about the values that make America great, and about the inner working of the international organization."

"[Economist Hyman] Minsky came from a Menshevik émigré family background. As a school student in the late 1930s he was a member of the American Socialist Party youth group, where he probably came across Trotskyists. He studied with Oskar Lange, Henry Simons, Frank Knight, and Josef Schumpeter, and became an economics lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1957 to 1965. He supported the 1964-5 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, a big starting-point for late-1960s student radicalism; or, at least, he was one of only two lecturers who tried to intervene to stop a mass arrest of the protesting students (Columbia Daily Spectator, 18 December 1964). He was active in the left-liberal Americans for Democratic Action. In 1965 he moved from Berkeley to a smaller, quieter university, and remained in a quiet academic world until his death in 1996."

"One day, I listened to a small meeting at which a dozen or more people were discussing how and how often to serve food. They argued over serving hours, menus (one person was a vegan, another loved protein), and who would cook and serve.
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'Interesting, isn't it,' said a friend, Art Goldberg. He's a lawyer who was one of the most famous leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s and has been protesting ever since. He stopped by the encampment every day during breaks in trial at the nearby courthouse.
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'If you're interested in food service,' I replied sarcastically. He said I didn't understand what I was seeing. They weren't just arguing about food. If I had listened carefully, I would have understood they were talking about the essentials of political organizing-communicating, assigning tasks, scheduling, motivating, and making everyone feel they are part of an important effort.
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After the meeting, a young woman came over to talk to Goldberg. He talked to her about the need to work out the differences. She said she was trying to mediate between two strong women, one who cooked and the other who served. I could see what was really involved at the meeting I had observed: leadership and bringing people together, the essentials of both serving dinner and running a campaign."

"[Alice] Waters drew parallels between the racial issues behind the protests on campus last semester and the free speech movement of the 1960s, which served as her initial source of inspiration for becoming an activist. In order to make dramatic change, she added, people must articulate themselves and say things out loud."

"In the fall of 1965, when the music scene in the Haight Ashbury was heating up and the campus of the University of California was boiling over with rebellion, I had the privilege of reviewing the Jefferson Airplane's first concert on campus for the Daily Cal, UC Berkeley's student newspaper. I was 18 years old, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and, like so many of my contemporaries, convinced that our activism and its soundtrack were going to change the world."

"When Robert F. Kennedy visited California in October 1967, he made a point of praising the most radical university in America. 'You are the first college to become a political issue since George III attacked Harvard for being a centre of political rebellion and subversion,' he told the students of Berkeley. 'I welcome the passionate concern with the condition and future of the American nation which can be found on this campus.'
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Modern student protest - that's direct action, mass participation and slogans that stung like adverts - was invented at Berkeley. It began with the Free Speech Movement of 1964, which saw Berkeley students rise up for their right to have a political voice, and they were still at it in May 1970, marching against America's bombing of Cambodia and the murder of four fellow students during a protest at Kent State by Ohio National Guardsmen. Berkeley sympathised - a student had died in the previous year's People's Park riot - and students carried posters hastily created by the Political Poster Workshop at the College of Environmental Design. Around 50 of these, previously in the collection of the late publisher Felix Dennis, are going on display in London for 'America In Revolt: The Art Of Protest' at Shapero Modern."

"As the free speech movement began at University of California, Berkeley in 1964, college students all over the country rallied against the war in Vietnam.
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The student unrest was blamed on a so-called 'generation gap,' which morphed into a political issue.
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Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California in 1966, and he largely owed his political career to the student uprising and backlash of the UC Berkeley movement."

"In the years leading up to the riots, UCSB students - as well as their counterparts all around the country - witnessed a virtually unprecedented rights movement and faced a wide array of struggles and injustices. The 1964-1965 free speech movement at Berkeley helped illuminate the walls enclosing students' freedom of expression, while the previous decade and a half's Civil Rights Movement helped foster a sense of justice in university students. In October 1968, the occupation of North Hall by members of the Black Student Union brought about, among other reforms, the creation of the Black Studies Department. UCSB students marched in Sacramento in protest of Reagan's regressive education policies and waged their own free-speech battles on campus."

"First Amendment constitutional rights and academic freedom for students are not mere abstractions. Instead, both were first recognized as a result of student protests. Participants in the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s were diverse enough to include the College Republicans, but most wanted to exercise their free speech rights to advocate for civil rights and anti-war causes."

"The students who took part in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 (sic) recognised this when they protested so that political groups that offended common orthodoxies would be able to campaign openly in the university."

"This absurdity is not confined to the UK; across the Atlantic the US has experienced an even greater proliferation of safe spaces and more ardent attacks on free speech. How sad it is to consider that just 50 years ago students in California fought hard and passionately during the Free Speech Movement.
Now we have Manchester's union blocking Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopooulos from participating in a debate on, ironically, free speech, and London Southbank taking down posters of the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster' because it may cause religious offence."

" [Republican Washington state lawmaker Matt] Manweller describes his bill as 'an academic bill of rights' with three key components.
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First, the bill reads that free speech may not be restricted to specified zones on campus. Second, it prohibits disciplining or dismissing a faculty member or student on the basis of a trigger warning or microaggression allegation. Third, it builds in due process rights for students.
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If a court determines that a university has violated any part of the bill, they are subject to fines of at least $500 plus $50 a day for each day that the violation remains.
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Manweller told The Fix that he has not faced any opposition from administrators or students so far. Planning to introduce the bill on Jan. 11, Manweller said he believes it will garner bipartisan support.
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'The free speech movement started at Berkeley in the 60's and was pushed by hard core liberals, and it was a long-standing liberal idea that free speech should exist in the face of hostile government repression,' Manweller said."

"Watching authoritarianism on the right grow simultaneously with authoritarianism from the campus liberal-left produces anxiety, but anxiety itself fuels these attacks on free speech. Is it time for another Free Speech movement ala Berkeley 1964-6? Or would that potentially hurt somebody's feelings?"

"A lot of other things happened after that, but now the University of California has free speech on campus. It changed. But it was so interesting to sit in that group of 5,000 people, people around you whom you'd never met. Food was being passed around and everybody was friendly, and if you look at the photographs, you'll notice the faces of the protesters and the faces of their opponents are completely different.
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The opponents have, sort of, cynical grins. You can pick them out from the crowd, the people who wanted to use hate speech against us. For those few days, there was something like a new form, a different form of society, presaging a different way of people relating to each other. And, it was such a powerful experience that a lot of people who participated could never quite go back, could never quite forget that. We were changed by that experience.
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I think the same thing happened in the Philippines during the anti-Marcos movement of 1983-86, and in Poland on a far larger scale during the Solidarity Movement of the 1980s. When this change of state takes place, it's not just that it is effective and you get what you want, but it itself is a different way of being, a different way in which humans relate to each other. That is exhilarating."

"One such Freedom Summer veteran was Mario Savio, the unofficial leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who told his fellow collegians, 'Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules, through organized violence, to suppress the vast majority. In California, the privileged minority manipulates the university bureaucracy to suppress the students' political expression.'
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On one level, Savio encouraged his peers to perceive a real parallel between political repression in the South-the familiar images of police dogs, water hoses and tobacco-chewing sheriffs-and the university administration's restrictive policies governing political advocacy on campus grounds. More viscerally, he tapped into an undercurrent of resentment about the everyday realities of student life."

"'The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offense and hurt. Its rampant policing of thought and speech is completely reactionary, a gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture, which was inaugurated in the U.S. by the incendiary Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.'"

"Sometimes, as Frederick Douglass once wrote, 'it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.' Some occasions call for rational debate, he said, but others demand nothing less than 'a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.' To acknowledge that is not to express hostility to discourse, but to embrace it - to embrace the power of speech in its full scope and capacity.
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Student activists have always understood the power of thunder. And they understand as well that sometimes thunder, on its own, isn't enough. Sometimes you have to do more than just speak. Sometimes you have to organize - to, as the First Amendment says, assemble and pursue a redress of grievances. Sometimes, as Mario Savio declared in the greatest and most famous speech to emerge from the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley half a century ago, 'the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that … you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' Because sometimes putting your body upon the wheels is the only influence you have."

"'I'm so tired and I'm so burned out from trying to learn and be an activist, and just be black - in daily life - in a city that has not dealt with these racial issues since the Free Speech Movement,' says Alecia Harger, who is co-president of the Black Student Union. 'We use this Berkeley bubble as an excuse or a mask or something to hide from these issues so we don't have to address them.'"

"Mario Savio was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 when he became a leader in the Free Speech Movement in response to a university policy that barred any political activity on campus. That ban included lobbying on behalf of political parties or issues and also activities in support of the civil rights movement that was sweeping the nation.
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Today, it is difficult to believe that just 50 years ago on a large college campus that you could not hand out leaflets, hold a political meeting or hear a civil rights leader speak.
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Savio [ed note: the FSM, not Savio] was credited with launching the practice of the campus 'sit-in' to protest the administration's policy, and his group eventually succeeded. But, nationwide, the seed was sown for campus politics, especially concerning the Vietnam War, and also for student power to win curriculum reforms to make subjects more relevant in the contemporary world. "

"Five decades after Mario Savio stood on the steps of UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall and addressed student activists gathered in the plaza, the echoes of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement still linger on campus-not in any monument but in the strength of today's student groups and organizations. It was these voices that the architects of Moore Ruble Yudell heard as they approached the Lower Sproul Revitalization Project, a $223-million initiative that opened this fall."

"Do we want our colleges and universities to be forums for the free exchange of ideas, or shelters for students who are easily offended by ideas they don't agree with and actions they find personally hurtful?
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That's the question posed by a series of student disruptions at some of America's leading institutions of higher learning, a question my generation thought was answered when the Free Speech Movement swept through campuses in the '60s and '70s.
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Back then, you could get arrested by UC Berkeley police for trying to raise funds on campus for civil rights causes. That's what happened to occasional grad student Jack Weinberg on Oct. 1, 1964, triggering a massive student protest demanding that administrators lift the ban of on-campus political activity and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.
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Free and open discourse became the order of the day, even if some of it was offensive, repulsive or just downright stupid. Students were expected to absorb the blows and respond with strong arguments of their own; you know, the free and open exchange of ideas.
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Everybody in the academy was on board with this concept.
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'Education should not be intended to make people comfortable,' said Hanna Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago. 'It is meant to make people think.'"

"Months of civil rights demonstrations have taught metropolitan police officers everywhere to handle 'limp' demonstrators; it requires two officers per demonstrator, and it can be efficient and painless. In Sproul Hall, however, police chose to drag the students, male and female, by twisting their arms into hammer locks, bending their wrists cruelly backward, and hauling them so that the pressure was on their sockets. One girl was pushed into the elevator on her face from several feet away. It should be stressed that there were reporters on the scene-but the police didn't always know it. Downstairs, they were letting no reporters go up.
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After about forty arrests had been made, the police saw that the process was taking too long. They withdrew temporarily (the students now call this 'the coffee break'), and when they returned had apparently decided to get rough. The new plan was to bring women down in the elevator, and men by the narrow marble stairs, although a few unfortunate women also made it down the stairs. Some were brought down by arms or shoulders, but reporters present say that most were hauled by their feet. One conscientious reporter counted the marble steps as he followed a girl whose head jarred sickeningly as she was dragged down. There were ninety….
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On Thursday afternoon, I watched the end of The Day of the Cops. There was no civilian authority anywhere on the campus. President Kerr was still in Los Angeles. Chancellor Edward Strong, chief Berkeley administrator (Kerr runs all nine university campuses), had disappeared. The University of California was completely in the hands of police. In every window of Sproul Hall a police guard was visible. There were guards on every door. Police patrolled the campus."

"To the Editor:
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Once upon a time in America (in Berkeley, to be precise) a Free Speech Movement brought students together to protest restrictions on political activities on the campus. Now, however, students at Amherst College demand that their classmates who advocate free speech should be remanded to 'extensive training for racial and cultural competency.'
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When did this core constitutional principle become not only divisive, but also identified with invidious discrimination? How is 'free speech' now the enemy?"

"They are joined by UC-Berkeley's Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who remarked on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement: '(W)e can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so.' Somewhere, Mario Savio is spinning in his grave. Irreverence, aggressive challenge and, sometimes, brutal honesty are the very stuff of academic discourse that undergirds intellectual growth. And it is being driven from the campus in favor of approved thought and emotional airbags."

"It was students in California who birthed a new era on college campuses, one in which collegians would demand to be included, to be treated like adults and to have a very public say on such hotbed issues as civil rights and the Vietnam War. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 became a defining moment in a nationwide trend, with students insisting they would not be silenced on some of the most controversial issues of the day.
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A half-century later, campuses are again the site of unrest and tension, but it's not about making speech more free - it's about curtailing hurtful speech and expression, whether displayed in a dormitory name, a Halloween costume or the would-be reporting by journalists barred from covering a protest for fear they won't parrot the demonstrators' views. Instead of warring, united, against the campus administration and government officials, students are facing each other down, demanding both diversity and a separate place to express their differentness. Professors worry about offending students in class with provocative texts or topics, while college administrators - far from being asked to let the young adults fight their own battles -- have been asked to step in as arbiters in the conflicts among the students themselves.
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...
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Regardless, muzzles have replaced megaphones on campus in many cases. And Bettina Aptheker, one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, is concerned at the trend.
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'As abhorrent as some speech is, and I certainly think [some] is, the administration of a university should not be in the position of policing it, because it's a very slippery slope,' says Aptheker, who is now a feminist studies professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. 'A lot of us liberal types or radical types could say racism is on the upswing, and I agree with that. But I don't think the solution to that is restricting freedom of speech,' she adds."
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[ed note: Bettina Aptheker, 11/25/2015, personal communication: "And the quote from me is not in context since I spoke at considerable length about the seriousness and gravity of racism on the campuses (and sexual violence) and what needs to be done about it."]

"But the civil rights movement inspired other currents of change that did target colleges. For example, the free speech movement that started in the fall of 1964 was sparked by University of California's attempts to curb student fund-raising for civil rights groups."

"Crazy things are happening at Missouri, Yale, and other colleges these days. And at the heart of the madness is a shocking rejection, even a condemnation, of the once-hallowed principle of free speech; the kind of speech that liberals used to at least pretend to believe in.
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The Berkeley 'free speech' movement of the 1960s thus comes full circle; now inverted to mean freedom not for, but from, speech, or at least speech that doesn't follow the ever-fluctuating party line. Once you conclude that speech you don't agree with is not just wrong but hurtful, perhaps even criminal, the next step is put those who have uttered it in the stocks, to be pelted by the frenzied mob.
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But our campus social-justice warriors don't just want to restrict speech; they also want to restrict any speech criticizing their efforts to restrict speech. People shouldn't be free to believe in the wrong ideas, defined as any that makes the left look bad, including such heretical concepts as 'truth,' 'facts' and 'logic.'"

"The San Jose Mercury News writes that every day more than a dozen professors have led teach ins' for the assembled protestors including a lecture on 'The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley,' a task undertaken in solidarity with students. Other students, alumni, faculty members, and university employees have delivered food and supplies to the protestors."

"Each day, more than a dozen professors lead 'teach ins' on topics ranging from carbon accounting to Bible-based civil disobedience. Professor [Eric] Roberts taught a class on 'The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.' Rush Rehm, a professor of drama and of classics, spoke on 'Antigone and Social Dissent.'"

"Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of 'Freedom's Orator,' a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
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'The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s,' Cohen said. 'Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization.'
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...
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Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism."

"The mass media have never been very good at covering student protest. Back in early December 1964, for example, the press totally missed the significance of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio's historic speech calling for mass civil disobedience, which helped inspire the largest campus sit-in in American history. Though Savio's 'bodies upon the gears' speech would eventually end up quoted in most US history textbooks and in narrative histories of the 1960s, even leading newspapers, such as the New York Times, garbled Savio's words and ran articles that gave no hint that his speech was one of the most memorable dissident orations ever made on a university campus. It was not until a week after the sit-in that Jazz columnist Ralph Gleason, who heard the music in Savio's words, became the first print journalist to quote Savio's speech extensively and accurately, and alerted the world that Savio's 'classic words' of resistance to unjust authority would be long remembered.
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This media tendency to miss the historical significance of a student protest was again on display this past week in the coverage of the revolt led by African American students at the University of Missouri. Though reporters did cover the story few set it into historical context, and none seemed to realize that Missouri's student movement against racism has with lightning speed emerged as arguably the most effective on-campus student revolt in American history. In less than a week the Missouri movement was able to win its central - and not easily attainable - demand, the removal of Timothy Wolfe, the University of Missouri's racially insensitive president, and also brought down the chancellor as well. Wolfe has been replaced by Michael Middleton, a veteran African American academic leader, with a strong civil rights record, including a history of anti-racist activism in his own student days at the University of Missouri in the late 1960s."

"At the Ivy League campus in New Haven, Conn., the Christakises are facing heated calls for their ouster simply for questioning the conventional Yale wisdom that students should avoid ethnic costumes like sombreros, headdresses and turbans. While some may find those articles of clothing insensitive, Erika Christakis said discouraging the dress could deprive students of intellectual discourse on the subject.
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"Nicholas says, if you don't like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended," she wrote in a reply to an administrator's mass email denouncing offensive garb. 'Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.'
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We applaud and echo that statement. Yale students, however, responded by surrounding Nicholas Christakis and unleashing a vulgar tirade, then demanding his and his wife's resignation.
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Progressives spawned the 1964 free-speech movement at the University of California-Berkeley when administrators there sought to suppress their political views. Today's campus liberals, however, are quick to deny others the same freedom.
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Modern undergrads want to live in 'safe spaces,' collegiate cocoons where PC values are sacrosanct, dissent is silenced and offensive speech protected by the First Amendment is quashed. They believe administrators should control student expression - even their dress - like overbearing parents.
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If young adults can't read classic literature without trigger warnings or endure a controversial opinion without throwing temper tantrums, our universities, our workforce and our society will ultimately suffer."

"Once upon a time panty raids and swallowing goldfish were the rites of passage for sophomores, challenging authority on campus with innocence and high spirits. Student rebellion darkened with the free speech movement at the University of California in the 1960s. Today free speech on campus is under attack from the students themselves."

"We lament that although the Free Speech Movement Cafe is one of the favorite on-campus gathering places for Korean students, many are apathetic - even opposed - to this critical issue regarding freedom of speech while a number of their non-Korean counterparts supported our cause. Mario Savio urged us to 'indicate to the people who run it' that without freedom, 'the machine will be prevented from working at all.' Our protest was a clear message to the operators of the machine that many of us at UC Berkeley demand that Korean citizens retain their freedom and that we refuse to be mere bystanders as democracy sinks, yet again, in South Korea."

"What happens in college matters. The intellectual habits that students pick up during these formative years go on to shape their behavior through the rest of their adult lives. And with college no longer the exclusive province of a tiny elite - some 40 percent of working-age Americans have now graduated from it - the hostility to free speech portends a dark future for American society.
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There's an irony here. During the last period of widespread campus activism, the late 1960s, the student agitators were fighting for freedom of expression; UC-Berkeley's famed 'free speech movement' is a case in point. American universities today could use a little more of the spirit of '68 [sic], and little less of the spirit of censoriousness that seems to motivate them in 2015."

"Longtime Potrero Hill resident Judy Baston's passionate commitment to Jewish genealogy earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, awarded at the Association's annual conference in Jerusalem last summer.
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Baston was born in Oakland to parents who encouraged her to pursue a professional career. Her father suggested that she become a doctor. Her mother disagreed, 'No, she'll be a writer.' Mom was right: in 1965 Baston was awarded a degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was arrested during the Free Speech Movement.
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'When I left college I went to work for the People's World, a surprisingly independent left wing newspaper. Amazingly, in the seven years I was on that staff, no one ever told me what to write!' Baston quit the paper in 1973, after former editor Al Richmond was expelled because of his memoir, A Long View from the Left. 'I left because I didn't want to be part of an organization that didn't allow for the kind of questions that Al was raising.'"

" [David] Goines, hearkening back to his days in the Free Speech Movement, argues students should not allow the UC to create any sort of policy regulating the content of their speech. This, he says, is surrendering the rights which he and his fellow activists fought for decades ago.
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'These rights that I fought for - you want to give them away. You just want to hand them over. You don't even want to put up a fight,' Goines said. 'Well, I think that's disgusting.'
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Santa Barbara Hillel executive director Rabbi Evan Goodman said free speech is not 'unlimited' and the Regents need to instate a policy that protects Jewish students from anti-Semitic "hate speech."
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According to Goodman, a line should be drawn - an argument he presented to the Regents at the working group's forum in October at UCLA. Rabbi Goodman spoke and advocated for the Regents to adopt a policy on anti-Semitism similar to that of the United States Department of State, which states that denying Israel's right to exist is an action considered anti-Semitic.¶
...¶
Former UC Berkeley student Goines argues that all advocates on the issue need to be well-versed on the First Amendment.
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'The First Amendment is not there to protect the government from you,' Goines said. 'The First Amendment is there to protect you from the government.'

"The issues that triggered the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 were real. The civil rights movement was raging, and students wanted to advocate for the cause inside the campus gates. Later, they moved on to protest the Vietnam War-a conflict that implicated students directly because of the draft.
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Today, students are motivated by a myth about racist police in Ferguson, Missouri, and are trying to suppress free speech on campus, not expand it.
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In 1964, students sat down around a police car on campus Berkeley to protest the arrest of one of their classmates. They proceeded to hold a 'teach-in' where everyone could speak-even those who disagreed with the them.
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Last month, students surrounded Wolfe's car in an off-campus parade to force him to acknowledge their demands. He still blames himself for not stepping out to talk to them-as if they had any intention of having a real conversation.
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And yesterday, the students forced journalists out of their 'safe space' on campus, in defiance of the Constitution, the law, and the principle of academic freedom. Students and professors assaulted photojournalist Tim Tai, and one activist even called for 'muscle' to remove a student photographer from the protest, where he clearly had a right to be."

"The video harkens back to fundamental sentiments first fought for in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, but its context is vastly different considering the series of events on the Yale campus over the past week. According to a Business Insider article outlining the timeline of events, the tension began with alleged racism from members of the fraternity SAE, who were accused of turning away students on Halloween based on race and ethnicity."

"Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, delivered a speech Thursday evening to commemorate late activist Mario Savio and recognize young people for their work in accordance with Savio's legacy.
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In his speech, given at the 19th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture in the campus's Pauley Ballroom, Romero - the first Latino and openly gay man to serve as the executive director of the ACLU - discussed how mass incarceration places limits on freedom of speech. The ACLU is a body that defends the rights of incarcerated individuals through legal representation.
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The event also recognized the winners of the Mario Savio Lecture Fund's Young Activist Award, a distinction given annually to young people who demonstrate a commitment to human rights and a proven history of activism.
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The three honorees of the evening included Eli Garcia for her advocacy of undocumented students' rights, Johnnie Turnage for his role as a voting-rights campaign organizer and Quentin Savage, who mobilized a campaign for racial justice in Kentucky."

"There's something to be said for working with and through the American radical lineage. But Foner's rendering of that tradition is disturbing. He mentions some very good names in the U.S. radical pantheon: Tom Paine, Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, the early 1890s Populists, and Sanders' own supposed inspiration, Eugene Debs. Many are left out, of course, particularly those of more radical hue, like the Haymarket Martyrs (including the revolutionary socialist-anarchists Albert Parsons and Adolph Fischer), Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, the radical syndicalist (Industrial Workers of the World - IWW) leaders Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, and Tom Mooney, IWW trubador Joe Hill, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, the heroic Communists and Trotskyists who sparked the emergence of mass production unionism during the 1930s and 1940s, Malcolm X, Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement, Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, the aforementioned anarchist-identifying linguist and anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky, and…I could go on."

"Outraged, the Black Student Union at Berkeley High called for a rally, and on Thursday morning, close to 1,000 students this morning. First they marched around the school, then to city hall, and finally they took their voices to UC Berkeley, the cradle of the free speech movement."

"Anne and I had been at UCBerkeley between 1958 and 1963; we left the year before the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley in October 1964. It unleashed forces that passed through college campuses across America in following years and along with the Civil Rights movement fed into a Counter Culture that changed America forever.
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Anne thought having an event at UAlbany in 1984 to look back on what happened in Berkeley in 1964 would be of interest to the college community and to Albanians who would be invited to attend the program she organized in the Campus Assembly Room. She had taken a Chaucer course from Charles Muscatine, one of the leading figures in the Free Speech movement; she would invite him to participate in a panel discussion. Bruce Miroff in the Political Science department suggested that she also invite Sheldon Wolin, who had been active in the Free Speech Movement."

"American universities have long been a haven for freedom of expression. Since the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, college campuses have been a safe place for wild ideas to take root, grow and flourish.
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However, the tides are changing across the country when it comes to free expression on campus.
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For the last few months, the regents of the University of California system have been debating over whether or not to adopt a revised policy defining intolerance. The new policy, which emerged after complaints over pro-Palestine groups, would enforce limits on 'unwelcome conduct,' including the broad use of 'language reflecting stereotypes or prejudice.'
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On the other coast, a recent poll at Yale University revealed over half of its student population favors restricting free speech on campus. While many students expressed a desire for a code against hate speech, even more said professors should be required to warn students before discussing discomforting topics.
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The assault on free speech on nationwide campuses has even crept into the presidential race. Retired surgeon Ben Carson, who is competing for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he would use the Department of Education to make sure no 'extreme' political views could be expressed by professors."

"One of the truly great things about being a student used to be the exposure university life gave you to all sorts of views - absurd and otherwise - and being able to decide for yourself what to make of them. Students were once known for their dedication to free speech and academic freedom, epitomised by the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 1964-65.
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In 2015, students are more renowned for the practice of trying to ban anyone they believe to have dangerous views in order to protect fellow tutees, whether it's removing the Sun from the shelves or refusing airplay to Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines. We witnessed this tendency most recently with the petition to ban Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University because of her 'misogynistic views towards trans women'."

"But while we are indeed deeply divided politically, the goal of the Free Speech Movement was never for students to agree on everything: The goal of the Movement was to get students to stand up for what they believe in, and to face the adversity that threatens our nation with ardor and hope. While we should continue to debate politics and argue about ideas, we should never endeavor to stifle the passion of the people with whom we disagree: When we get annoyed at bad activists, we ought to criticize bad methods, but not activism in general.
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Caring is apolitical, and apathy is equally dangerous to us all. Our generation faces unprecedented adversity, and we handicap ourselves when we spend our time trying to silence opposition rather than encouraging everyone to fight for what they think is right.
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The legacy of the Free Speech Movement survives in our sustained ability to speak out. Let us use it to declare what young people have declared for decades: We are this country's next generation, and things must change. We may be divided by ideas, but we will strive to remain united in our yearning to do what is necessary, and what is right."

"The political theorist Sheldon Wolin, who died October 21, lived in the presence of time past, time present, and time future. Perhaps because he understood time well, he lived fully in his own. He was an airman in World War Two and a pilot, navigator, and bombardier thereafter. He spoke for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. In his revolutionary text Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960), he made a way through the Western canon and beyond it, transforming political theory from a European inheritance into a terrain of labor open to Americans, indeed to all."

"Wolin's influence reached beyond the theoretical scope of his studies. According to [Jack] Citrin, Wolin was a generous and wise counselor to students during the Free Speech Movement. Wendy Brown recalled that Wolin was one of the earliest faculty supporters of the movement.
'It's not like he went out and stood on the car with Mario Savio - he worked on the level of organizing the faculty and leading the faculty to affirm the Free Speech Movement,' Wendy Brown said. 'The faculty Senate supporting the Free Speech Movement was precisely what eventually got the administration to back down, and the Free Speech Movement won.'"

"Interested in reaching a nonacademic audience, Professor Wolin, in collaboration with his Berkeley colleague John H. Schaar, wrote frequently for The New York Review of Books in the 1960s on the Free Speech Movement and campus unrest at Berkeley.
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The essays were included in their book 'The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society' (1970). Professor Wolin later wrote for the review on Watergate, Henry Kissinger, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and American conservatism."

"Half a century ago - on the first of March 1965, to be exact - there emerged from the midst of the increasingly excited and politicized student body at the University of California at Berkeley a new twice-a-month publication with the ominous title Spider. It reported and commented on the turmoil among student activists, including the affray nicknamed the 'filthy speech movement' in parody of the earnest Free Speech Movement of the previous fall. But everyone was in a good mood, because the FSM had been a great success, achieved entirely by nonviolent means, so students could feel virtuous as well as successful."

"Before there was J Street, before Peter Beinart, back in the days before there was any serious Jewish 'pro-peace' lobby, at a time when Jewish peace groups rose and fell like colts finding their legs, there was Tikkun, founded in 1986, critical of the right and what Lerner calls 'the religio-phobic' secular left. In 1988, then-Gov. Bill Clinton wrote a complimentary letter to Lerner about Tikkun. In 1993, the Washington Post described Lerner as Hillary Clinton's 'guru.' The first lady gave a speech invoking the 'politics of meaning,' Lerner's creed that statecraft had to be soulcraft, addressing 'ethical and spiritual needs.'
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That Lerner, a grizzled Berkeley-San Francisco veteran of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, should find himself sitting on the White House lawn … well, what wasn't possible on a day when Rabin and Arafat were shaking hands as if the previous 50 years were a game of tennis?"

But opponents of the new speech policy say that linking anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel sets a worrying precedent that could be used to censor free speech.
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'I am part of a community of Jews and scholars who are critical of Israel,' Mandy Cohen, a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, told the AP on Monday. 'They are, in fact, seeking to silence me.'
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This is not the first time that the University of California - the university system that gave birth to the free speech movement - has run afoul of free speech advocates. Earlier this year, UC Santa Barbara sent a letter to students asking them to report to the administration 'acts of intolerance, disrespect, bullying, or violence, especially regarding sexual orientation, race, gender, ethnicity or religion.'
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FIRE, a college free speech group, highlighted the speech code as having a 'powerful chilling effect.'
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'It's as if administrators believe that if only they can stop students from saying hurtful things, the underlying conflicts will go away. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth,' wrote Samantha Harris, the organization's director of speech code research. 'By discouraging debate among new students out of the gate, UCSB is doing its students a terrible disservice in the name of tolerance and civility.'"

"It's a disappointing reality that many students would now give up free speech for the reason that it might offend or marginalize certain communities. Campus communities should remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement he led at UC Berkeley. Those demonstrations were instrumental in establishing and expanding how students and faculty can express their politics."

"Yet another example of today's Anti-Free Speech Movement for American universities - unfortunately, one that fits well into the Education Department's attitudes. Fortunately, courts have firmly rejected these kinds of calls to restrict college student speech, though the OCR [Office of Civil Rights] and the college administrations it pressures can get away with a lot of restrictions until the lawsuits are actually brought."

"According to The Atlantic, student activists at the UCLA already had clashes since 50 years ago with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which is a series of events that could expand people's free-speech rights at public universities and colleges.
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Recently, the activists at UCLA demand that administrators should punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is apparently protected by the First Amendment.
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In the past, clashes regarding free speech rights have turned on whether American people have the right to criticize their own government during the time of war to march as neo- Nazis past the Holocaust survivors' homes, to submerge in urine the crucifix, or to burn the American flag- in which all of these things have been ruled by courts and are said to be protected speech."

"Meanwhile, colleges and universities (even the public ones that are supposedly beholden to free speech on campus) have been using the spectre of hate speech to justify banning controversial speakers from campus, instituting prior review of student newspapers, and other forms of censorhip and intolerane. At the University of California, Berkeley-erstwhile home of the student Free Speech Movement-students now repeatedly pushing for more administration censorship of everything from student editorials to fraternity party themes."

"A half-century ago, student activists at the University of California clashed with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a series of events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at public colleges and universities.
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Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
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In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in urine, or to burn the United States flag.
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All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.
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What did UCLA students find so outrageous as to warrant the violation of the fundamental right to free expression? A "Kanye Western" theme party where students wore costumes that parodied rap superstar Kanye West and his celebrity wife, Kim Kardashian. For this, UC student activists would squander their inheritance.
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Perhaps 18-to-22-year-olds can be forgiven for failing to appreciate what's at stake in their activism. But UCLA administrators cannot be forgiven for complying with student demands to punish this free expression-a glaring illustration of their low-regard for the First Amendment, California law, and liberal ideals."

"A series of 1965 articles by Harris Vincent in The Daily Utah Chronicle tell the story of 'Charlie Brown,' a traveling hippie who is credited for introducing Utah to the counter-culture movement.
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Charlie 'Brown' Artman was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to a Methodist minister. He attended Cal Berkeley, where he was part of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, during which he and more than 700 other students were arrested. He would later drop out of school 'so that he could study.'" [ed note: photos]

"UC Berkeley and the Savio Steps were chosen to launch the 2016 US college tour of the exhibit because of their historical significance and symbolism with regard to the Free Speech Movement that began there in 1964. The steps are named after Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, who gave his now famous speech from the steps. The protests surrounding the movement were unprecedented in scope at the time and centered around the insistence by students that the university administration lift the ban of on campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. After UC Berkeley the exhibit will be traveling to UCSC and other college campuses across the United States and will continue throughout the 2016 Presidential Campaign season right up until next year's election in November with stops in Cleveland and Philadelphia next July, 2016, during the Republican and Democratic conventions."

"Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a famously outspoken atheist, said Friday the trend of students pushing to disinvite speakers on college campuses is a 'betrayal' of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
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Dawkins, speaking with Bill Maher on HBO's 'Real Time,' discussed the idea of 'regressive leftism' and how typically liberal crowds -- like college students -- have acted in non-liberal ways. Dawkins drew on the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, a famous protest by students demanding academic freedom and for the school to lift restrictions on political activity on campus.
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'What a betrayal we're seeing now with campuses all over the Western world over -- America and Britain -- are denying people the right to come and speak on campuses. If you can't speak your mind on a university campus, where can you? I mean, that's what universities are about,' Dawkins declared."

"INSIDE THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT, PART 3 On Sunday at 3 p.m. the Berkeley History Center presents 'Inside the Free Speech Movement, Part 3.' Inside the Free Speech Movement, a film series by Linda Rosen and Jai Jai Noire, features oral history interviews that grew out of the BHS exhibit on the Free Speech Movement. It covers the civil liberties and civil rights issues that led up to and were launched by the FSM. Students of differing points of view came to consensus and successfully convinced the faculty, and eventually the administration and the Regents, to support First Amendment rights. Free, but must call 510-848-0181 for a reservation. Berkeley History Center is at 1931 Center St."

"Jacob Williams told VERSA [University of Oxford student publication]: 'There is nothing offensive about healthy debate. To ban us from promoting it on the grounds that people might be offended proves everything the free speech movement has been saying. No offence OUSU [Oxford University Student Union], but you just shot yourself in the foot.'"

"When talking about his entrepreneurial success, Ross maintains he has a very specific vision for each of his cafés. Combining creativity and practicality, he tries to tell a story with a combination of food and ambiance. In the case of the Free Speech Movement Café, Ross has been trying to figure out what kind of food matches that historic movement.
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'Studying the free speech movement, it was more than just about free speech,' Ross explained. He sees this movement as a symbolic, more progressive time. Thus, he tries to get the food to relate to his vision.
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With the new menu, Ross tries to take this initiative a step further, sourcing his food from even more local vendors than he did before. He sees it as an introduction to a new way of eating, without as much of a reliance on carbon and water intensive products such as meat. Whereas, previously, the menu centered around traditional landmark foods such as turkey sandwiches and tuna melts. But they have now moved toward a more seasoned, organic and sustainable menu with the help of Alice Waters, chef at Chez Panisse and pioneer of the seasonal menu. However, he also recognizes that the majority of his clients are students, so he keeps his food affordable to people on a budget."

"In addition to her work with DPN and #BlackLivesMatter, Cullors has recently completed a fellowship at the Acrus Center for Social Justice Leadership. The fellow ship focused on state and vigilante violence for the 2014 Without Borders Conference, according to a statement from the Pugh Center. Cullors is also a Fullbright Scholar, the 2007 Mario Savio Activist of the Year, and received the Sidney Goldfarb award. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a dual degree in religion and philosophy."

"Logically, there should be absolutely no contradiction between advocating for free speech in general and supporting the free speech rights of critics of Israel. An abstract principle for freedom usually does not come accompanied by 'except in the case of.' And yet that has been the case when it comes to discussions of Israel-Palestine.
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Indeed, Gary Tobin, Aryeh Weinberg and Jenna Ferer begin their 2005 book, 'The Uncivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses,' by evoking the Free Speech Movement, only to immediately limit it. They note the inscription at Sproul Plaza commemorating the FSM, which reads, 'This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction,' but then they negate that: 'Despite the myth surrounding the seal and its ring of soil, it is not - it cannot be - an absolute sanctuary for those who wish to abuse the right of free speech, because no such place exists … Both the rules of the larger society and the social norms of the campus require reasonable boundaries on what can be said. Perhaps the campus has fewer constraints, but safety and civility necessitate that some limits are imposed.'"

"'I don't think it can be overemphasized that UC Santa Cruz and Chez Panisse were born in the free speech movement,' she [Alice Waters] said. Those currents fed both the intellectual community on campus as well as the menu at her groundbreaking restaurant."

"Furthermore, Schorske made no pretense of producing a comprehensive history. Rather, he framed his book as the perspective of an interested American onlooker, one who saw parallels between late-imperial Vienna and Cold War America, where the defeat of New Deal values brought about an analogous radicalization and depoliticization of the artistic sphere. The presence of Austrian and German émigrés on American soil-Schoenberg in Los Angeles, teaching John Cage and cheering on the U.C.L.A. football team-made the link all the more obvious. When Schorske spoke of the failures of liberalism, he was thinking not only of German-speaking lands; as a professor at Berkeley, in the nineteen-sixties, he had defended the Free Speech Movement while Governor Pat Brown ordered mass arrests. Now, in the year of his death, the bigoted mass politics of Schönerer and Lueger hardly seem a distant prospect. A glance at the morning paper confirms that a semblance of democracy is no guarantee of a just society."

"Sometimes the corporate-friendly CSU Trustees and Chancellor's Office have behaved less like stewards entrusted with a precious public resource, and more like 19th Century robber barons, beating up the faculty union, demanding 'take-backs' that crimp shared governance, and placing new burdens on students and their families.
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Mario Savio's famous analogy of the University as a factory where the administrators are the bosses, the faculty the workers, and the students the raw material has nearly been realized at the CSU.
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We need to re-invigorate the wider promise of these public institutions that took decades to build and have given a leg up to countless thousands of Californians who, like myself, had doors opened for them they never even knew existed.
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I do not believe it was the intention of the authors of the Master Plan to create a vehicle for administrators and managers to enrich themselves.
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I believe the intention was to provide the highest quality education to California's young people at the lowest cost.
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Trustees and Chancellors in recent decades have drifted far afield from this original intent."

"The obvious goal with this UC battle is to institutionalize the notion on American college campuses that activism against the Israeli government is not merely wrong but is actually "hate speech" that should subject its student advocates (or professors) to severe punishment. If this menacing censorship is allowed to take hold in an academic system as large and influential as the University of California, then it's much easier for the censors to point to it in the future as a model, in order to infect other academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world. That's all the more reason to vehemently oppose it in this instance. If defenders of Israel are determined to defeat the boycott movement, they'll have to find other ways to do it besides rendering its advocacy illegal and, in the process, destroying the long-cherished precept of free speech in academia."

"If the phenomenon of limiting free speech should be happening anywhere, the last place is at universities. College campuses were once the epitome of liberalism and the right to express oneself. Student activism has been a staple of this country's history and culture. Some of our parents possibly championed the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley from 1964-1965. And in 1969, the Supreme Court specified in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that students don't 'shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.' But recently, American universities have become a hotbed not for freedom of speech, but rather freedom from speech."

"Just over 50 years ago, University of California, Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement that brought the principle of freedom of expression to campuses across America. On Thursday, the University of California regents went back to the drawing board after discussing their proposed policy, a Statement of Principles Against Intolerance, to protect students from intolerant speech. The policy statement was met with criticism from Jewish groups who found its language to be too weak, as well as First Amendment scholars who see it as a threat to free discourse at a campus that championed it half a century ago.
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The policy as it was initially presented was vague in its wording, making it unclear just what is being protected and what is being condemned. It also asserts that it 'shall not be used as the basis to discipline students, faculty, or staff,' however, the universities will not hesitate to 'respond promptly and effectively' to any report of intolerance on campus. If left unaddressed, the statement's lack of clarity could have a chilling effect on free speech on campuses, as students may be unclear about what may result in punishment from their university."

"Schorske went on to receive the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' in 1981, the year of its inception, and a Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in the same year for his most well-recognized work, 'Fin-de-Siecle: Politics and Culture.'
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At UC Berkeley, Schorske was regarded by colleagues as a liberal thinker and a reputed supporter of the aims of the Free Speech Movement, identifying with students' demands for free speech and respect.
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'You have to convert the poison of social discord into the sap of intellectual vitality,' Schorske said in an interview in 2000, reflecting on his time at UC Berkeley."

"Fifty-one years after the Free Speech Movement began at UC Berkeley, a perversely opposite movement holds sway at too many colleges in California and across America. It's built on the notion that some ideas are so painful to contemplate that they should be kept from mentally fragile college students, who need ample 'trigger warnings' before they are confronted with uncomfortable content.
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Thankfully, President Barack Obama used an education town hall last week in Des Moines, Iowa, to rebuke this bizarre status quo: 'I've heard of some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative, or they don't want to read a book if it had language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal toward women,' Obama said. "I don't agree ... that when you become students at colleges, you have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them, but you shouldn't silence them by saying you can't come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.'"

"Late last year, HBO's Bill Maher condemned the PC nature of college campuses after UC Berkeley students petitioned to remove him as the December graduation speaker because of comments he'd made about Islam.
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'They invited me because it was the 50th anniversary of something that is legendary on that campus-- the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. I guess they don't teach irony in college anymore,' Maher said. 'And then a few weeks ago, Ben Affleck was on our show and we had a discussion about Islam that I've had a thousands and one nights with a lot of other people, but he's an A-list movie star, so now our very deep media started to care about it... Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn't upset you? The University has come down on my side saying what I hope they would say all along, which is 'we're liberals, we're supposed to like free speech!''
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Former NYC Michael Bloomberg made similar remarks during his 2013 speech at Harvard University, saying it's a shame that many commencement speakers have been pushed away because of political correctness and that this is damaging to those who want to learn and grow.
'This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw -- or have their invitations rescinded -- after protests,' Bloomberg said. 'In each case, liberals silenced a voice -- and denied an honorary degree -- to individuals they deemed politically objectionable. This is an outrage. If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, to speak as you wish, and to marry whom you wish, you must tolerate my freedom to do so -- or not do so -- too. What I do may offend you. You may find my actions immoral or unjust. But attempting to restrict my freedoms in ways that you would not restrict your own leads only to injustice.'"

"By 1966, Schorske himself was famous enough to be featured in a Time magazine article about the country's most prominent academics. Although known for his work about the distant past, he had participated in the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and explained to Time that he wanted his classroom discussions to be 'relevant to where the action is.'"

"State Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, also a regent, said it will be challenging to knit together a statement that embraces free speech while condemning anti-Semitism. But, she said, 'We can rise to the opportunity.'"

"It's been a half-century since the Free Speech Movement was born on the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley, inspiring nationwide protests and creating the principle of unfettered expression on campus.
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On Thursday, UC regents debated a modern-day sequel: how to allow for free speech while protecting students against prejudice.
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A proposed new policy against intolerance was criticized by some regents and Jewish groups as too weak in dealing with what they contend are rising numbers of anti-Semitic incidents on campuses. Others complained that it went too far and would stifle dissent.
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The UC regents on Thursday withdrew the controversial policy statement and launched a new effort to rewrite it over the next few months."

"UC Berkeley has been a burr under the Right's saddle ever since Mario Savio declaimed freely on free speech in Sproul Plaza back in 1964. Cal, in fact, remains the default example for conservatives fulminating about the deficiencies of American higher education. Most recently, they've railed against Cal policies on microaggression and trigger warnings."

"UC Berkeley is considered the home of the free speech movement. Now, more than half a century after student protesters lifted a ban on campus political activities, the UC Regents, concerned that free speech has become hate speech, considered a formal policy.
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The draft they debated Thursday condemned intolerance, including violence, harassment, hate speech and derogatory language. Students on the Cal campus told ABC7 News they don't feel there's a problem here.
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'Walking through Sproul Plaza, people are expressing themselves,' said one student.
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'I'm a Sikh and I feel very welcome here in campus,' another student said.
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The regents heard complaints Friday that their proposed principles don't adequately address anti-Semitism. For example, a Jewish fraternity at UC Davis was defaced with swastikas earlier this year.
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Hatem Bazian is a professor of near eastern and ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He says he gets anti-Muslim reactions. For example, hate mail after posting about the Muslim boy arrested in Texas this week after his clock was mistaken for a bomb. He says the university should not be a place where any topic is off limits.
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'What defines tolerance and intolerance on a college campus? What defines acceptable and unacceptable speech on a college campus? How can we make sure that tolerance is not conflated with unpopular positions?' Bazian said."

"Melba Beals was a civil rights legend even before coming to SF State. She was one of the famous 'Little Rock Nine' -- African American students who put their lives in danger by attending an until-then all-white Arkansas high school. Once the subject of news stories across the nation, Beals came to SF State to study journalism herself. Other Gator crusaders include Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt; American Indian activist (and first female chief of the Cherokee Nation) Wilma Mankiller; Free Speech Movement icon Mario Savio; and Mu Sochua, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for her fight against international sex trafficking."

"In the end, I signed California's loyalty oath. For those who are curious about how I came to do so, let's just say that the Fifth Amendment promises me that I cannot be compelled, in any criminal case, to be a witness against myself. Last year, during my first months of teaching at SF State, I enjoyed my proximity to the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. This year, it's time for a new free speech movement, one that will liberate California's public college and university professors from the state's loyalty oath."

"Before Alice Waters became famous for her cooking at Chez Panisse, she was part of the free-speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a student in the 1960s. So while salad would become her most renowned medium after she opened her restaurant near the campus in 1971, politics has always been important to Waters.
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It should be no surprise, then, that as a restaurateur famous enough that she is often referred to simply as 'Alice,' Waters would have a long-running relationship with American politicians. Though she turned down an offer to cook at the inauguration of a fellow Californian, Ronald Reagan, in 1980-she claimed not to know the way to Washington-Waters gladly accepted an invitation from President Barack Obama to come to the capital on Thursday to be honored with a National Humanities Medal."

"A New Jersey native whose family seldom dined out, Waters traces her activism to her days as a student of French cultural studies at UC Berkeley, where she was deeply influenced by the Free Speech Movement, and where her junior year abroad took her to France."

"We walked around the campus last weekend. We had a little bath in nostalgia. It was lovely.
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Along the way, we happened on the Free Speech Cafe. It features blown-up black-and-white photos of the FSM demonstrations, along with a plaque reminding us of a time when Americans were not allowed to speak freely. Which, if you were there, is a little much. Berkeley was never like North Korea.
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I walked up to the counter guy and said, 'You know, I was in the Free Speech Movement.' I regretted saying it even before I said it; it is my experience that younger people are not interested in the tales of older people, no matter how colorful they may be.
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Oh Lord, Jon, why did you have to blurt that out?
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To my surprise, the barista sheen disappeared from his eyes. He looked interested. 'Really? So who was that?' He pointed at a figure, wild-eyed, surrounded by cops.
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'That's Mario Savio,' I said.
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'Oh, really. And who's that?'
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So I told him the whole story: surrounding the police car, Savio's speech, the confrontation at the Greek Theatre, the arrests at Sproul Hall.
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'Really?' he said. He looked at the photos again. 'Really?' he said, with more wonder. I pointed to a plaque above his head. 'I was there when Savio said that. It was the only great speech I ever heard in person.'
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So we shook hands and I bought a latte.
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Here are the most-quoted lines from that speech. Just a reminder, is all, that there are things you can do in case complaining doesn't seem to cut it. 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!'"

"None of the regents have asked me, but I would urge them not to make the same mistake that the university made 51 years ago this month, when its assault on free speech triggered the Free Speech Movement (FSM). Back then, the university was trying to stop us from using the Berleley campus to organize against racial segregation and discrimination by businesses in the San Francisco Bay area. Now, they are trying to stop a new generation of activists throughout the university system from creating a new reality in the Middle East and in US foreign policy. Have the regents and administrators learned nothing over all these years? Don't they realize that they are risking a massive defeat, either in the courts or from the steps of Sproul Hall?"

"And yet, compared to college students in the past, millennials are in some ways woefully under-parented. Before the 1960s, college authorities existed in loco parentis, which meant that when you sent your children away to college, the college assumed parental authority over them. Adults supervised dorm life and carefully monitored social visits between young men and women, making sure that visits remained chaste and that all young women had safely returned to their rooms by a respectable hour. Students could be expelled at will, without due process, for immoral behavior. This changed in the 1960s, mainly because of lawsuits brought by students disciplined for joining in civil rights protests and because of the Free Speech Movement. College students became full adults whose constitutional rights the courts began to protect."

"Rather than entertain, let alone respect, an opposing view, leftists today conjure up the concept of 'microagressions' to justify physically assaulting an anti-abortion protestor, or, as Arondekar's colleague repented in a recent retrospective of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, liberals for too long argued for freedom of thought and expression without considering who wields 'power.' These freedoms of expression and thought should be controlled, abrogated and contested everywhere the contemporary leftist holds."

"Activists in the free-speech movement were suspicious. They thought the argument for the multiversity as a critique of the elitist university was a sham meant to pacify democratic desires 'to educate previously unimaginable numbers of students'-or what today we might call 'a diverse student body.' Critics argued the multiversity was actually meant to suppress intellectual inquiry under the cover of serving 'diverse' interests and over-determinedly linking students' objectives with 'the workplace' or service to the nation. Kerr's multiversity was seen by some as a clever, coded educational design appearing to expose students to multiple fields of inquiry, where 'knowledge production' was taking place, but, in reality, was channeling uses of knowledge into discrete frames representing particular outside interests. As such, the purposes of the multiversity betrayed any kind of independent thinking that could be used for political, cultural, and social liberation and imagination."

"And I've developed a habit of corresponding with a handful of political prisoners like you whenever the quality of writing for my own account has degraded to a prosaic shitbroth barely rising to the level of travelogue. And for that, I get to write to inspirational souls who have thrown themselves into the gears of the machine Mario Savio exhorted us all to do and you, well, you get me at my absolute worst, my most self indulgent. And I feel badly about that. I do. I sabotage relationships constantly like this on the left as well as the right."

"It's time for the largest and most diverse segment of Americans to change the axis that the nation currently operates. Instead of operating on a left/right axis, why not go in a bottom/up direction?
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This is the only way to combat the unhealthy methodical direction that America has been on since the end of the Civil Rights Movement. That majestic movement forced America to come closer to the values that it committed to paper in 1787.
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It was the decade of the 60s when the Civil Rights Movement begat the Free Speech movement, which begat the Vietnam protest, which begat environmental legislation. Each movement began at the bottom treading the arduous path upward.
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The Occupy Wall Street and tea party efforts offered glimpses of this bottom/up effort but ultimately fell short. The occupy movement didn't have the messaging to hold the nation's attention; and the tea party has been coopted by moneyed interests and now sits comfortably on the left/right alignment.
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A bottom/up trajectory can create new alliances; some that may be initially philosophically opposed. Whether one is liberal or conservative, income inequality is real."

"In addition, John became a prominent, principled foe of the student radicalism and 'counter-culturalism' sweeping American campuses in the late 1960's and early 1970s. His public debates with Stanford University's 'Maoist' Professor H. Bruce Franklin appeared as the book Who Should Run the University? He also debated leaders of the Berkeley 'free speech' movement. In 1969, President Nixon invited him to join the White House Task Force on Priorities in Higher Education, to suggest ways in which the federal government might help calm the turmoil on American campuses. In 1971, he accepted another Presidential appointment, this time to the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse; he long continued to argue against marijuana legalization."

"Meanwhile, leftist activists were rebelling against the rapidly expanding Vietnam War. Young men were being drafted to go off and die for a questionable cause.
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The UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement and antiwar protests soon spread to other university campuses, triggering mass student violence and angering voters, especially those not having been privileged to attend college themselves. Reagan was their voice."

"The usual conservative suspects have bashed the notion of microaggression, and they've been joined by the liberal Los Angeles Times, which wrote in a recent editorial:
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'It's troubling when an institution tries to squelch debate or discourage controversial ideas, but it's downright alarming when this occurs at a university - and even worse when it's the University of California, whose Berkeley campus was at the center of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s.'
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'…colleges have always been bastions of free expression because the learning process requires students to debate controversial and occasionally disturbing ideas. UC has done a disservice to that noble academic goal.'
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But don't expect the UC mandarins to deviate from their course."

"More recent protests, such as Occupy Wheeler, have not adapted to this change, allowing the methods of iconic and successful movements to shape their protest without taking into consideration the changes implemented in more recent history. Though many expected Occupy Wheeler to cause clashes with the police and administration as they did during the Free Speech Movement and 2011's Occupy Cal, as a result of new campus policy, no such confrontations ever occurred, and the Wheeler protest lasted only a week."

"Bulletins from the NAACP's Journey to Justice march, from Selma to Washington, D.C., from former Free Speech Movement activist Jack Radey, whose wife, Kathleen Piper [Ed note: Piper was also an FSM participant], is walking:
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Radey cites his wife's description of an Alabama sheriff coming to the march with her horse, so that marching kids could meet it. Most Alabama state troopers they've encountered have been African American. 'The march's plan is to walk every step of the way, but sometimes they have been asked to not tie up traffic in small towns, so they have a 'spring team,' a small group who walks through such points while the others ride the bus. No friction or opposition, smooth sailing.'
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It took some time to get singing started, but at last, following the example of one older woman, the marchers began lifting their voices. Piper was asked whether she knew the words to 'Oh, Freedom.' Her philosophy: 'When you're making up verses and you are stuck and can't think of one, go back and repeat the first verse until you can think one up.' This advice is useful for just about everything."

"Half a century ago, the defense of free speech was closely identified with groups like the Free Speech Movement, a confederation of activists who came together at the University of California, Berkeley, after a student was arrested for setting up a table of civil-rights literature, in defiance of anti-solicitation rules. Defending free speech meant defending Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman, and, later, Larry Flynt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the 2 Live Crew. In a 1990 public-service announcement, Madonna, wearing red lingerie and an American flag, delivered a civics lesson, in verse: 'Dr. King, Malcolm X / Freedom of speech is as good as sex.' She was urging young people to vote, in partnership with Rock the Vote, whose slogan was 'Censorship is Un-American.'"

"We started by simply refusing to leave the protection of free speech, press, and assembly to lawyers, judges, and a Constitution whose meaning the Supreme Court rewrites at will. Civil liberties is a birthright we best defend with public education and massive civil disobedience. When in the 1960s students at Berkeley and other universities demanded almost complete free speech on campus, and were willing to fight to get, we got it. When we dramatically insisted that free speech be extended to suspected Communists or anyone else, we severely shredded the non-stop effort by supposedly liberal university and government officials to redbait us. When mostly black civil right activists took to the streets and highways, we won the beginning of a campaign we must now continue to ensure that black lives matter. When enough young people burned their draft cards in public, we held a war-making government in check. But when protesters willingly allowed themselves to be herded into wire-enclosed 'free speech zones,' the right to protest lost most of its punch."

"Sonoma State does not have a free speech zone policy, according to spokeswoman Susan Kashack, but it does have something else: Math instructor Mario Savio gained worldwide prominence in 1964 and 1965 as part of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which demanded that UC Berkeley administrators lift the ban on on-campus political action and speech.
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'Because of who he was (an excellent teacher), what he stood for in the '60s, and the strives that were made in that movement, a group of students, faculty, staff and administrators chose to honor Mario by creating a 'Mario Savio Speakers Corner' on campus,' Kashack said. 'It is used by some groups and not by others, but free speech is not limited to that area.'"

"Several months later, [Ronald] Davis was found guilty after the judge at the trial disallowed any testimony about free speech. But the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit claiming that the commissioners' actions amounted to censorship. In 1966, a San Francisco judge ruled that the parks commission could not censor the content of performances and that the Mime Troupe must be permitted the use of public parks.
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It was another victory in the long battle over free speech in the Bay Area, which included such milestones as a beat cop's casual censorship of Beat poetry, the 1960 City Hall protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lenny Bruce's 1961 obscenity bust at the Jazz Workshop and, of course, the epic Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964.
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'It was one of the things that opened the door of artistic freedom in San Francisco,' [Herb] Gold said. 'You could see the Mime Troupe's action that day as a hyphen between the Beats and the hippies.'"

"I just read that the Planet was interested in first-hand stories of the Troop Train protest of 50 years ago. Gar Smith mentioned that I had been "on the tracks" and wondered what I had to report. Well, here it is.
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I had been attracted to Berkeley by the beatnik/political scene and quickly became involved in the small group of general-purpose campus radicals upon my arrival in 1963 - I had the honor of picketing Madame Nhu in October of that year with Allen Ginsburg. After service in the Free Speech Movement I was naturally attracted to the Vietnam Day Committee' efforts to protest the growing war. I hung around the VDC house on Fulton Street and did what I could to help."

"City officials had been advised that the Pentagon planned to send a train loaded with young soldiers through Berkeley on their way to the Oakland Army Terminal, to board ships to Vietnam where they would ordered to kill the 'Viet Cong.' It was clear that many of them would not be coming back.
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Many of us walked to that intersection filled with memories of the day in 1964 when, as students, we spontaneously sat down around a police car driven onto the Berkeley campus to arrest an activist named Jack Weinberg. That nonviolent sit-in not only immobilized the squad car, it stopped the arrest and kicked off a little ruckus called the Free Speech Movement (FSM).
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'What if?' we thought. 'What if a group of nonviolent protesters occupied those railroad tracks and brought a Pentagon's war machine to a halt?'"

"Pamela was an extraordinary woman, abounding in compassion, courage, humor, integrity, intelligence, wisdom and beauty. It was our good fortune to have her in our midst for more than 71 years. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1943, she moved with her family to Northern California in 1951 and graduated from Santa Catalina School for Girls in 1961. Pamela was an innovative, catalytic and deeply authentic social activist for more than half a century, starting with her participation in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was an art history major in the mid-nineteen-sixties."

"There were other underground papers in the Bay Area at the time as well, but they tended to be more narrowly targeted; The Oracle to 'the heads,' the Express Times to the political activists. The Barb was unique, says former contributor and Free Speech Movement alum Kate Coleman, in being 'the only one that brought the whole counterculture together-drugs, rock 'n' roll, free speech, free love, politics-all of it.'"

"Tom studied theology at West Virginia Wesleyan University for two years. There, he met and married his first wife, Barbara. He spent another three years in Ohio studying theology before the couple moved to Berkeley in the mid-1960s, where Tom planned to complete a doctoral degree at the Graduate Theological Seminary.
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But living in Berkeley during the tumult of that decade changed Tom profoundly, leading him away from a life as a Methodist minister and, ultimately, to his life in Bolinas.
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According to his friend Jim Pelkey, Tom liked to recount his first day of classes at Berkeley. Walking around campus with a pipe in his mouth, he ran into a bare-chested woman and heard a speech by Mario Savio, a founder of the free-speech movement. He gravitated toward Mr. Savio's call to avoid becoming a 'cog' in the machine.
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Unburdened by the structures of home and church, he started to open up spiritually and philosophically. 'His whole life was structured,' said Tim, including his early family life, work and studies. But in the environment of Berkeley, Tim went on, 'His free spirit bore through and came out.'"

"Sculptor and filmmaker Jerry Barrish was founder-proprietor of Barrish Bail Bonds, which 50 years ago bailed hundreds of Free Speech Movement protesters out of jail, and 35 years ago was the first business donor to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. 'Plastic Man,' a portrait of Barrish and his post-bail-bondsman life as an artist, directed by well-known local documentarian William Farley and produced by longtime Festival director Janis Plotkin, showed at the festival on Saturday afternoon."

"When the 1960s rolled around, Goines was very active in the Free Speech Movement. He became the head leaflet printer for the activists which led to his expulsion from UC Berkeley. His dislocation from the academic life was actually a blessing in disguise, he says, launching him into a career as a printer." [Ed note: It was occupying Sproul Hall that got Goines arrested.]

"I-House Berkeley was initially met with considerable resistance. Many protested the construction because it would allow not only white people and underrepresented minorities to live together, but also men and women.
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'I-House broke the color barrier for students of all different nationalities,' said I-House Executive Director Hans Giesecke.
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[Kwei] U noted that the Free Speech Movement exposed him, for the first time, to the 'anti-establishment thoughts Berkeley has become famous for.' He said this movement was initially shocking to him, as he grew up in Hong Kong, where citizens were taught to respect the establishment.
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'It was a very exciting, tumultuous time, but as a foreign student, you had to be careful not do anything to endanger your visa status,' U said."

"But the school that birthed the Free Speech Movement (imperfectly practiced today) can still occasionally provoke a protest that's both entertaining and informative.
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Students that oppose UC-Berkeley's increasing reliance on contract workers came up with a novel jamboree on Tuesday, The Daily Californian reports:
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At about noon, a group of about a dozen students and workers combined gathered before the doors of Chancellor Nicholas Dirks' office, carrying a letter and a cake decorated with the phrase: 'I don't always pay fair wages, but when I do it's in Berkeley and Richmond.' They sang an original song, based on the song 'Super Freak,' with lyrics criticizing the administrators for treating workers unfairly."

"'If implemented, this definition would restrict free speech and academic freedom with regards to criticism of the policies of the State of Israel,' warned UC Santa Cruz Professor Nancy Stoller. 'In the same year that the University of California celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, it is distressing that the current president of the University of California is asking the Regents to adopt this definition that would threaten speech more than it would protect students.'"

"[American journalist Charles] Glass and [Italian sculptor Davide] Dormino would also like the statues located near where Mario Savio spoke and through the local sponsoring organization, Green Cities Fund, have approached the University asking to place the statues near the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft only a few feet from where Mario Savio delivered his fiery speech in 1964. Then, the University, under pressure from Governor Reagan in collaboration with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, fought the Free Speech Movement [1]. Hopefully it will make a wiser choice today and allow Snowden, Manning and Assange to stand on this hallowed ground."

"Her family put down roots in a Mountain View prune orchard when that small agricultural community was beginning its transition to becoming the heart of Silicon Valley. She arrived in Berkeley right after the Free Speech Movement, and describes her interactions with students who had participated in the historic sit-in at the University of California's Sproul Hall where they demanded their constitutional right of freedom of speech on the campus."

"[Gus] Hall's successful speaking tour wasn't an aberration. In the 1960's, Communists were speaking on college and university campuses in front of large audiences all across the country, thereby challenging HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee and its assault on the Bill of Rights, and spurring what would soon become the campus free speech movement, led by young Communists like Alva Buxenbaum, Bettina Aptheker, and Jarvis Tyner - just to name a few. Thousands of students would soon join the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, the Young Workers' Liberation League, and the Communist Party.
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That the Communist Party USA was in the vanguard in the defense of democracy, the Bill of Rights, and the campus free speech movement serves to exemplify its long-standing commitment to radical patriotism - this July 4, and every July 4." [ed note: Scholars knowledgeable about the matters recounted in this article consider it to be flawed in many respects, including the account of the FSM. Bettina Aptheker wrote: "Jarvis Tyner and Alva Buxenbaum had nothing to do with the Free Speech Movement. Both lived in the New York area at the time; however, both were involved with the Du Bois Clubs, which was a national organization.]

"'We need to invoke the spirit of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement that helped put Berkeley on the map in the first place,' [Max] Anderson said. He called for the public to 'throw your body on it [the political process] and stop it from grinding you up,' paraphrasing Savio's famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall."

"Earlier this year, Place was dropped from the Berkeley poetry conference celebrating the 50th year of the free speech movement on campus." [ed note: this was not the 9/30/2014 political poetry event held on the UCB campus by the FSM Archives. see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcO9M-2wJU0&feature=youtu.be]

"During the '60s, students at Berkeley understood that a campus climate of absolute tolerance for free speech was a precondition to successfully combating injustice in the UC system and elsewhere. Liberal and libertarian students and professors fought the administration for the right to hold political rallies, opt out of loyalty oaths, and advocate against the Vietnam War. They trusted that their ideas would win out in the court of public opinion, and only needed to establish that they had the legal right to utter such ideas.
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Today's UC campus body would be well served to recall these lessons. There is in fact no better place for unfettered free speech than a university campus, and students who spend their four-plus years in college without encountering provocation or offense won't be adequately prepared for life in the real world. Students should recognize a censorship-lite approach like Napolitano's for what it is: an attack on the idea of the university as a safe haven for all kinds of speech."

"SACRAMENTO - The University of California has been the subject of derision lately for its recent faculty seminars designed to wipe out so-called 'microaggressions,' which the university describes as 'everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults' that 'communicate hostile messages' to members of 'marginalized' groups. These can be unintentional and even 'preconscious' or 'unconscious' slights.
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Some of the media barbs have been focused on a fact sheet, distributed by the UC president's office, that gives examples of such behaviors that create a hostile environment -- e.g., asking a person of Asian or Latino descent where they are from, saying that 'America is the land of opportunity,' or criticizing affirmative action as 'racist.' UC identifies other microaggressions as mistaking a female doctor for a nurse or 'being forced to choose male or female on a form.'"

"Another dark day was May 13, 1960, when City Hall hosted a hearing by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was traveling the country trying to root out communism.
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College students protested the hearings, and police turned fire hoses on them, literally washing them down the huge marble staircase inside the building and hitting them with clubs. The protest made national news and is credited with starting the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.
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'Today, you and I can't imagine something like that happening in San Francisco, much less in City Hall,' said Jim Yager, a former producer at KQED who is making a documentary of City Hall's 100 years. It is set to debut at City Hall on Nov. 18 and air on KQED afterward."

"These efforts date back to the 1960s. Graduate student-workers at UC Berkeley unionized during the Free Speech Movement in 1964; in 1969, graduate student-workers joined the faculty bargaining units at CUNY and Rutgers, followed closely by University of Wisconsin-Madison's Teaching Assistants Association, who gained recognition independently of faculty in the same year." [Ed Note: Per NYU Professor Robert Cohen, TA unionization efforts date back at least to the 1930s.]

"GELLER: From the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, it has been a long descent - or perhaps a long revelation of the left's authoritarianism and hypocrisy. The left is not interested in free speech or free discourse. It wants to crush all dissent."

"My situation was more extreme. My biological mother got sick and I was raised by a black women those first years in Bakersfield. When Civil Rights came along, on the front page of the national papers, the four girls walking out of their church in Alabama-those girls were my age. That could be any one of us. By the time the Civil Rights Movement hit, oh man. Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Mario Salvio. I wanted to be Mario Salvio. He led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley."

"Graham went on to explain the show's story, which takes place during the '60s and involves a 35-year-old presidential candidate named Neil Sky. Modeled after Neil Young, Sky represents everything a '60s kid could want. (The title of the performance is borrowed from Jack Weinberg, an activist at UC Berkeley during the '60s and a member of the Free Speech Movement.) Notably, Sky will put everyone over 30 in a rehab facility where they'll get LSD in their drinking water. The plot is loopy and absurd, and Graham said it was inspired by Billy Wilder's comedies. Mostly, however, 'I did it just for fun,' Graham said. 'All art should be for fun.'"

"Sunbelt millionaires and suburban moralists appalled by the Free Speech movement, student radicalism, youth culture, 'creeping socialism,' black militancy and other developments made up the support not just these two men but generations of conservative power brokers. Radical right-wing groups like the John Birch Society have strong bases of power in and around L.A., but especially in adjacent, conservative Orange County."

"The marching feet and righteous cries of protest have long been widely regarded as a distinguishing feature of UC Berkeley and its surrounding city. But about five decades after the Free Speech Movement, the issues inciting dissent among students and residents have moved far beyond the campus's most iconic days of demonstration.
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In the past year, protests have erupted in Berkeley because of issues ranging from the national reaction to police killings of unarmed black men to the matter of public-private partnerships conducted by the campus. The way the city and campus respond to protests, too, has evolved. Most recently, an investigation into Berkeley police's use of tear gas and other less-than-lethal weapons on demonstrators in December was launched.
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See the following guide to the causes of and responses to some of the UC Berkeley-related protests in recent history."

"The cradle of the free speech movement is being tested in a big way.
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A website called Canary Mission is targeting University of California Berkeley and other college students for expressing their political views. One of their goals is to prevent these students from getting jobs.
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In the past, coal miners took canaries into coal mines to detect dangerous gases. If there were toxins, the canary would die before killing the miners. It was their warning system. This website Canary Mission warns employers of who are protesting, particularly against Israel.
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Having a political position may cost you a job, that's what those behind the website are telling all students, especially those with what they claim support anti-American and anti-Israeli messages.
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Among those targeted is the current UC student regent Sadia Saifuddin. The website has a complete profile on her, including what they call infamous quotes."

"'I have lived in the Bay Area most of my life,' she said. She grew up amid the student Free Speech Movement at the University of California in the 1960s; lived in San Francisco in the time of the Haight-Ashbury hippie movement; ministered in an urban parish 'at the height of the Black Panther Party developments'; and has had 'ties with the nascent and now flourishing LBGT community through friends and associates,' she explained.
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'I do not believe that these seemingly disparate historical movements and aspects of a regional culture have faded into the dim past, but in fact they give substance and roots to the reality of a vibrant multi-layered Bay Area culture,' she said."

"Banning speakers includes the recent wave of 'disinvitations' of controversial figures after waves of protest from students and faculty. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), 257 such incidents have occurred since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited speakers from delivering their speeches. In this theater of the absurd students from U.C. Berkeley -- birthplace of the 1960's free speech movement -- attempted to disinvite the comedian and social commentator Bill Maher, who delivered his commencement speech nonetheless, pointing out that apparently irony isn't taught in college any longer.
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What may have started out as well-intentioned actions at curbing prejudices and changing thoughts with the goal of making people more tolerant has now morphed into campus thought police attempting to impose totalitarian measures that result in silencing dissent of any kind. The result is the very opposite of what free speech and a college education is all about."

"That free speech zone, the lawsuit says, is unconstitutional, because it 'quarantines free expression to a tiny fraction of the Blinn College campus, despite the fact that the college has many open areas and sidewalks that are suitable for expressive activities.'
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The zones are common at colleges. The foundation estimates that rougly one in six schools in the nation have free speech zones. [Attorney Catherine] Sevcenko said the zones' roots are in the free speech movement of the 1960s, when universities set about establishing speakers' corners, areas where students could always go to speak their mind.
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'At some point the principal got turned on its head and they started using these areas to quarantine speech instead of a go-to spot where you could always express yourself,' Sevcenko said.
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[Nicole] Sanders, who is studying political science and wants to go into constitutional law, said she hopes her case will expand free speech on the campus.
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'I hope this will make all of Blinn College a free speech area and maybe that more students will be interested in starting clubs without having to jump through hoops just to talk to students they go to school with,' Sanders said."

"But if what happened in April 2015 in Baltimore was indeed rioting, then I would wager that so were the uprisings in Paris, Mexico City, and Prague in 1968-tumultuous unrest that cemented for citizens the world over the absolute value of democracy. If citizens who took to the streets of Baltimore in April 2015 were rioters, then so was UC Berkeley undergraduate Mario Savio, who helped galvanize upper-middle-class, white, educated American youth around the Free Speech movement in 1964 with this admonition:
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There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!
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The visceral quality of that machine metaphor conjures the physical nature of conflict, of vulnerability, in such moments of all-out commitment. It invokes our sense of Civil Rights activists 'going limp,' the lynched bodies hanging from the branches of American trees, the bodies made to march under the weight of guns, made to take aim at other bodies in the name of war. And the relevance of those terms to the events happening only days ago in Baltimore makes me feel foolish-outright delusional-for having once thought the many decades separating us in our 21st-century now from that awful then might keep us-and not just those of us who are black, but all of us-safe."

"Then in November, students at the University of California, Berkeley, attempted to block Bill Maher from speaking at their winter commencement over his past comments about Muslims. Such an irony, the TV host couldn't help but note. Exactly 50 years earlier, Berkeley had been the home of the Free Speech Movement.
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The Purdue policy states, 'It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.' Nearly identical language appears in the Chicago version."

"Frank grew up in New Jersey and attended graduate school at UC Berkeley during the 'Free Speech Movement,' a milestone in her political development.
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'That's where I was coming from. We thought we had the answers. We always saw a bright future,' Frank said. 'We were so naïve but we were committed. At 73, one is no longer so naïve.'"

"Freedom is messy. It jostles, it elbows, it pushes and shoves. It is contentious. It has to make room for Pamela Geller and Mr. Rogers, for the Klan and the Quakers, for angry protests and quiet vigils.
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That is liberty. Oh, that it could be as kind and gentle as some of our readers wish. But then, it would no longer be freedom."

"'It was hard to be Mario Savio because he didn't want to be famous,' said Jonah Raskin, professor emeritus of communication studies at Sonoma State and a former colleague and friend. 'People read about him or saw him or heard him on TV and had an idea of who he was and, in a lot of ways, he just wanted to be an ordinary person.'
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He recounted how Savio, who served as a professor of mathematics and philosophy at Sonoma State from 1990 until his untimely death in 1996, believed that college campuses should be used as a platform to inform, and not a place where students were restricted in their ideas and forced to silence their speech. '(The 1960s), though not that long ago, were like the dark ages for free speech,' he said.
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Elaine Sundberg, associate vice president of academic programs at Sonoma State, said people would often approach Savio and ask if he was 'the' Mario Savio. His response, she said: ''Well, somebody has to be him.''
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Joshua Gutierrez, a student at the college interested in a career in journalism, said he sees Savio's ideals as principles to live by. 'Savio's ideas should extend to any individuals who feel an obligation to defend their own condition or that of another,' said Gutierrez.
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Raskin added that Savio was a 'moral crusader' because of the influence of his rhetoric, whether in the 1960s or at Sanoma State. He 'would get in front of an audience and start to speak and it wasn't only what he said, it was how he said it. He had a sort of electrical force,' said Raskin. 'He seemed fearless.'"

"Cullors earned a degree in religion and philosophy from UCLA. She is also a Fulbright Scholarship recipient and in 2007 she was named the Mario Savio Activist of the Year.
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Cullors and others demanding accountability won a major victory in December when the LA County Board of Supervisors voted to create a civilian oversight panel to oversee the county Sheriff's Department.
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"We live in a county that is the biggest jailer in the world, housing anywhere from 17,000 to 20,000 people inside its eight facilities. This is not just a national problem; it's a local problem."
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Cullors regularly sets five- and 10-year goals for herself and told the Weekly that in five years she expects to see 'authentic' black leadership in all branches of government and more political power in black communities. In 10 years, Cullors hopes to see the prison population cut in half and some law enforcement agencies abolished.
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She has recently started Black Spring, which is designed to help African Americans realize that the fight is not only for equality, but for human rights."

"He [Mario Savio] descended the steps a legendary hero of the left and the modern politicized university environment was born.
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Since then, we've seen five continuous decades of increasing and unrelenting progressive policies taking root and reaching full flower in academia. The result, unfortunately, is anything but 'free speech.' Instead, we have achieved the absolute antithesis of what Savio once championed: the enforcement of political correctness, speech codes, trigger warnings, free speech zones, safe zones, and the suppression of arbitrarily-labeled 'hate speech' or anything that supposedly offends someone or deviates from the current hegemonic political orthodoxy.
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In half a century, astonishingly, we've come full circle and achieved the exact inverse of what the Free Speech Movement claimed it intended. What began as lawless civil disobedience now exploits campus regulations to rescind from others the same rights these erstwhile campus radicals once demanded for themselves. In other words: the oppressed have become the oppressors. Talk about Freudian reaction formation!
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Today, at college campuses across the country, we regularly read of bullying, intimidation, shouting down opposing points of view, and dis-invitations delivered to accomplished speakers representing unpopular views. Examples of free speech outrages in academia are legion. Here are but a mere smattering from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's legal case website: Marquette University Faculty Member Facing Loss of Tenure for Opinions on his Blog; Pro-Palestinian Group Fined for 'Offensive' Political Expression; Unconstitutional Punishment of Sorority Over 'Inappropriate' Theme Party; Citrus College student threatened with removal from campus by an administrator for asking a fellow student to sign a petition protesting NSA surveillance of American citizens.
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Without delving into the details of these individual cases, the overriding principle is clear and sacrosanct: free speech rights exist precisely to defend unpopular speech. Popular speech, after all, needs no defending. On campuses across the country today, the freedom to speak one's mind has been redefined as the freedom to repeat the tired, worn, passionless, approved slogans of the powers-that-be, or else."

"After graduating from San Rafael High School, where he served as SB President, Richard matriculated to U.C. Berkeley in 1964, where much to the consternation of his parents, he became actively involved in the Free Speech Movement."

"There is a great deal of industry in the city and a real working class; I also appreciate the vibrant presence of the Mexicans. In the last half century every significant cultural and technical trend has emerged from California, including the Free Speech Movement and the acceptance of gays and lesbians as an integral part of a dignified society, computers and the Internet, and-thanks to Hollywood-the collective dreams of the entire world. A fascinating density of things exists there like nowhere else in the world."

"An interview with UC Santa Cruz professor of feminist studies Bettina Aptheker will be featured in Rebels & Revolutions--the second installment of NBC Bay Area's year-long documentary series Bay Area Revelations--premiering Saturday May 9, at 9 p.m.
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Narrated by Emmy Award-winning actor Peter Coyote, the one-hour film examines the San Francisco Bay Area's history in leading political and social movements, beginning with the Free Speech Movement and covering gay liberation, black power, drug culture, AIDS, assassinations, cults, and same-sex marriage.
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The program is told primarily through personal interviews with individuals who played a major role in these pivotal points in history-also including Senator Dianne Feinstein, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Willie Brown, State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, UC Santa Cruz alumnus and author David Talbot, and San Francisco District Attorney and civil rights lawyer Terence Hallinan."

"The roots of the Vietnam peace movement were in the civil rights, student, and women's movements of the early Sixties. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement and the National Organization for Women all were asserting domestic demands just as the US draft and troop escalation took place in 1965. SNCC's Mississippi Summer Project and Freedom Democrats' convention challenge occurred at the time of the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf 'incident' and war authorization. SDS supported "part of the way" with LBJ in late 1964 while planning the first peace march in April 1965 in case Johnson broke his pledge of no ground troops. The Free Speech Movement of September 1964 set the stage for the Vietnam Day Committee and Berkeley's first teach-in. The civil rights movement and also Women's Strike inspired the National Organization of Women for Peace, which opposed Strontium-90 and pushed for President Kennedy's 1963 arms treaty with the Soviet Union. Together these movements were demanding a shift from Cold War priorities to "jobs and justice", the banner of the 1963 March on Washington, and were deeply shocked by the assassination of Kennedy and subsequent escalation in Vietnam."

"Among other things, international students are intrigued by Berkeley's free speech history, which was sparked in 1964 when the university banned political activities at the Telegraph Avenue entrance of the campus. The protests culminated in a student takeover of Sproul Hall, boosted by philosophy major Mario Savio's 'bodies upon the gears' speech on the administration building's steps.
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The protests led to negotiations between students and administrators and eventually opened the campus to student activism. Last September marked the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, whose legacy clearly lives on.
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"I'm drawn to Berkeley because I feel it's more free," says Haojun Li, 20, a sophomore double-majoring in statistics and computer science who has leaped at every opportunity for expressing dissent since coming to Berkeley from Shanghai in 2013."

"What was consistently clear from statements, discussions, and conversations is that for those in attendance, FSM was a deeply transformational experience, one with enduring impacts that still reverberate today -- although not always the same impacts, and not necessarily fully understood either. As one person put it during a group session, 'I've spent 50 years trying to figure out what happened here, and to me, in the last months of 1964.'"

"Sonoma State University student Sandy Espino Valenciano will be recognized with the Mario Savio Award for student activism by the American Civil Liberties Union northern California chapter of Sonoma County on May 3 in Santa Rosa.
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As Northern California Coordinator of the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, Valenciano has devoted herself to the fair treatment of undocumented persons."

"She gave the commencement address last year at UC Berkeley, where she highlighted the Free Speech Movement's 50th anniversary and spoke about challenging the status quo. An estimated 22,000 people attended that speech.
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'Opportunity for all has always been a defining feature of our economic system. Yet, we have challenges. So let's be disruptors,' she said, as reported by the Daily Cal. 'Let's build ladders of opportunity ... Education is a critical rung in that ladder.'"

"Since [Phyllis] Wise's letter, a number of university leaders have echoed her invocation of civility. In September, Nicholas Dirks-once a postcolonial historian and anthropologist who wrote critically of British rule in India, and now chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley-released a statement to his campus community. Reminding his constituents that 2014 was the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, he called for civility in terms that should surprise anyone who has studied the First Amendment or the long history of academic freedom: "We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility. Simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas. In this sense, free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin-the coin of open, democratic society." Dirks seems to have forgotten that the Free Speech Movement was not an event characterized by civility either in its expression or in its suppression."

"And the signs! We'll certainly miss the signs, the flyers, the papers, the hastily stapled advertisements, the free poems, sonnets, haikus, limericks - you name it! What about the invasion of elderly activists on Friday afternoons? There must be a progressive geriatric clinic somewhere close by. Or maybe their grandkids just don't visit them enough.
¶
Alas, the loss of such hallowed ground would make us pine for its return! Sproul Plaza is UC Berkeley. It conjures up memories of the Free Speech Movement, of sexual and mental liberation and of guided tours! Oh, how we miss those! It was the place of Occupy and many other movements. Even professor Robert Reich has stood at the feet of the great Sproul Hall to deliver an address to the student body. The plaza has the power to connect us with our past better than the history offices in Dwinelle Hall. How could we forget it? Losing Sproul Plaza would be like losing the thumping heart of a campus that has a reputation for inciting high blood pressure in its student body."

"But even after the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which helped overturn 58 years of legalized segregation, there remained a tension between the law and its practice. So we needed Rosa Parks to keep her bus seat in Montgomery. We needed four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to ask for a cup of coffee at the Woolworth diner in Greensboro in 1960. We needed a letter from Birmingham Jail, a march on Washington, and the valiant efforts of others before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed.
¶
(That inspired students at the University of California at Berkeley and the free-speech movement. Along that same line rose the protesters who questioned the morality of the Vietnam conflict.)"

"[Professor Alan] Kors noted that the movement for free speech began with left-wing students at Berkeley in 1964, but it's now the left-wingers who are calling for speech codes and howling in outrage at perceived offenses, he said.
¶
'Somehow we have gone from the Free Speech Movement to the you-can't-offend-anyone movement,' he said. 'That to me is the infantilization of students.'"

"I began this academic year at convocation and in my first Daily Californian column talking about the importance of community for this university. I observed that a community that is diverse and yet strong, passionately engaged but also respectful of difference, is what makes it possible for us to take risks: 'It is our safety net as we explore new ideas, engage with new people and perspectives, and seek to translate our beliefs and commitments into tangible form.' I also noted, echoing the sentiments of Mario Savio himself, that as a university that became identified with the principle of free speech during a campuswide movement 50 years ago, we must remember that our campus commitment to the constitutional protections on all speech, political or otherwise, comes with enormous responsibility. I anticipated that we would be tested anew, that the balance between civil discourse and free expression in a university community is sometimes difficult to negotiate and that our intellectual obligation to offer and debate divergent views risks creating divisions and even divisiveness. In short order, a national debate erupted about the relationship between free speech and civility.
¶
As I later wrote, that debate missed the point. For one thing, I was assuredly not abridging long-held commitments to academic freedom, a principle that is at the core of what we represent and how we operate as a university committed to truth and freedom. Nor was I in any way seeking to redefine our fundamental adherence to free speech. And yet I was attempting to suggest that as a community, we also have a common belief in the importance of sustaining the social conditions of dialogue, exchange and meaningful engagement -- conditions that are part of what a university community aspires to do and to be."

"The latest issue of California magazine ('Ideas from the leading edge') landed on my kitchen table recently. I was immediately struck by the cover line: 'The Dropout Issue: Straying From the School.' I eagerly turned to the lead article. It was titled: 'The Myth of the Berkeley Dropout.'
¶
So, that's it. I'm a myth. I always knew I was. You may tell the ancient story of how I chased the sun and fell out of the sky.
¶
I did indeed drop out of Berkeley - or out of the school, more precisely. I stayed around the campus, infected with the heady brew of politics (Free Speech Movement), writing (the newspaper, the humor magazine) and sex (none of your business). I've always regretted dropping out, sort of."

Dropping out may not be part of the Berkeley tradition, but political activism most certainly is. A 1966 report entitled Education at Berkeley found that 'The uncommitted student who has no meaningful goal for his life and who leaves college to find himself, has been less conspicuous than the student who finds meaning in championing the downtrodden.' Even before the Free Speech Movement, students at Berkeley rallied behind civil rights and in support of faculty resistance to the Loyalty Oath. As evidenced by numerous campus demonstrations in recent years, including the Occupy Cal protests of 2011 and the post-Ferguson marches last winter, the tradition continues.

"The Woz first attended Cal in 1971, after a year at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 'I fell in love with snow,' he said of his out-of-state flirtation. Two things lured the San Jose native back from the Front Range. First, The Graduate had just hit movie theaters and its portrayal of Berkeley made an impression on the young Woz. Second, and more important, Berkeley was famous as the home of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'It made up a huge part of my life [and continues] until this day … especially speaking out against the [Vietnam] war. They were standing up for different kinds of human rights…. Maybe because I'd been a geek and I'd been shunned … I always cared about people that cared about other people.'"

"In 1967, two products of Telegraph Avenue ran for mayor of Berkeley, Jerry Rubin and Bill Miller. With their campaigns came theatrical aspects of the counterculture that had not been present in the Scheer campaign.
¶
Bill Miller ran the General Store on Telegraph, a head shop. Miller had been active in the Free Speech Movement and early protests against the Vietnam war. His ethos was on the hip end of the uniquely Berkeley blend of counterculture and New Left."

"U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco rejected that argument Monday. He said the FBI can't claim the law enforcement exemption because it has failed to specify any particular law it was trying to enforce.
¶
'Generalized monitoring and information-gathering are not sufficient justifications' to withhold information, Seeborg said. He cited a 1995 ruling by a federal appeals court that denied a Justice Department's attempt to withhold information from journalist Seth Rosenfeld, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, about FBI surveillance of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.
¶
'This decision upholds the public's right to know about FBI activities that are not sensitive crime-fighting activities,' said ACLU attorney Julia Harumi Mass. 'Communities in Northern California have a right to understand how they're being spied upon by the government.'
¶
The FBI declined to comment. The agency can ask a federal appeals court to overturn Seeborg's ruling and to block disclosures while it considers the appeal."

"1. At least we can finally dismantle the peculiar façade Berkeley likes to wave around that it's the 'home of free speech' or whatever it is people fooled by Berkeley's skin-deep liberalism like to say. The Free Speech Movement happened in 1964 because of the repression of free speech information tables and fliers, not because the University of California or the City of Berkeley embraced free speech principles. The university has a vice chancellor sitting on the board of the Downtown Berkeley Association that wrote and promoted these new laws. Nothing has changed."

"These two episodes bring to my mind an episode at UC Berkeley a short time before I left Berkeley for Albany in 1963. A request was filed to hold a Nazi march at the University of Berkeley campus.
¶
The request was approved and the rally was held with much gnashing of teeth at a university that was the very citadel of democratic liberalism. It turned out that a far-left political group at UCB filed the request to test the limits of free speech at California's flagship campus, the finest public university in America at the time.
¶
The Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus in 1964, two years after the Nazi march was held that was sanctioned by university authorities. At issue was the distribution of political pamphlets just inside an entrance to the university. At one level, the issue was about funding of the university by the state legislature; at another level it was about politicization of the University. Should the university be dedicated to disinterested learning or should it give itself over to ideological conflict? I have leaned in the direction of disinterested learning, what I would call commitment to academic learning.
¶
This makes me a relic of the past, as I understand full well. Yet, when I read about radical or reactionary campus groups pushing their agendas on college and university campuses today it makes me uneasy. When this morphs into advocating violence I feel that something is desperately wrong. My previous blog addresses this issue in a particular context, the fomenting of Islamic terrorism in English universities."

"Last summer during the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks asked students in an email to express 'civility' in their free speech. While civility is important for everyday speech, Dirks imposing his definition of 'civility' onto students is akin to requesting that students censor themselves when speaking under the protections of the First Amendment. This is all quite ironic since the purpose of the celebration of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement was to recognize former Berkeley students who protested against the UC administration's ban of on-campus political discussions."

"East Cameron Folkcore plays every show as if their lives depended on it. The Austin eightpiece unleashes a galvanizing force that's part social protest, part cathartic release, part celebratory anthem. All wrangled through the vital voice of a restless and wanting generation.
¶
The local outfit led off its opening SXSW showcase slot with a blistering statement of intent, Mario Savio's 1964 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech broadcasting into the explosive 'Robin Hoods Rise' from standout 2013 sophomore outing For Sale. Likewise, frontman Jesse Moore pulls no punches in railing against predatory loans through 'Sallie-Mae,' cast as a bitter lovers ballad."

"Free Speech Movement video screening event
¶
The Berkeley Historical Society will present a showing of the video 'Inside the Free Speech Movement' at a program from 3 to 5:30 March 29 at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St.
¶
The video by Linda Rosen and Jai Jai Noire features oral history interviews with major participants in the movement.
¶
'It covers civil liberties and civil rights issues that led up to and were launched by the FSM and how it became so successful. The Student Rights Movement, which began in Berkeley, spread throughout the United States and the world, influencing the 1968 Paris student uprising and Prague Spring. Berkeley's anti-Vietnam War protests, which followed on the heels of the FSM, demonstrated how youth could successfully challenge the status quo and emboldened others to follow suit.'
¶
Featured are Bettina Aptheker, Jack Weinberg, David Lance Goines, Kathleen Piper, Jack Radey, Anita Medal, Prof. Leon Wofsy, Prof. Peter Dale Scott, among others.
¶
A question-and-answer period will follow.
¶
Admission to the screening is free, but donations are welcome. Seating is limited, so call 510-848-0181 for reservations."

"During the 1964-1965 school year, what came to be known as the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, my alma mater. Students protested a variety of restrictions on their ability to express opinions, particularly political opinions, on the campus. I'm not quite old enough to have been there for the beginning of the movement, but when I arrived on the Berkeley campus 10 years later, the spirit of the movement was alive and the changes the movement had achieved were manifest. I often ate my lunch or took a break between classes on Sproul Plaza, which was at the center of the Free Speech Movement's protests and remained a daily bazaar of political speech. I learned a lot from listening to speakers and participating in rallies on Sproul Plaza and count those experiences as some of the most important of my college career.
¶
Some people have questioned the University of Iowa's commitment to free speech, and ironically, at least to me, it's because of an action I took. I was the guy on Dec. 5 who asked the artist to remove the statue he had placed on the Pentacrest. Here's why I did it: It's my job to enforce a policy that places modest and reasonable restrictions on the time, place, and manner of some forms of free expression on campus. More on the restrictions in a moment."

"Yet where else, too, do we see so much discontent? So much righteous anger, so much vitriol and venom professing just how miserably we have it here. Whether it be our utter outrage over a controversial commencement speaker or a culturally appropriative party theme, we lurch into action to not only condemn but eliminate the things that offend us from the sanctity of our ivory prison, seeking to liberate the home of the Free Speech Movement from the vice of the uncomfortable.
¶
Constipated in righteous anger, many students seem to see evil in all directions while bearing a perpetual scowl. With so much hate needing to be silenced on this campus, fellow students, how do we sleep at night?
¶
Blowing up social media this week has been a veritable avalanche of praise for the University of Oklahoma's swift and retributive action against a fraternity that was caught singing a racist chant so blatantly insensitive that I won't repeat it here. Among the university's admirers are several of our own student leaders and perhaps even you as well.
¶
Upon learning of how this fraternity had 'misused their free speech,' as the university put it, the chapter was disaffiliated, the house forcibly emptied of its occupants and two of its members were quickly expelled with the chief charge of 'creat[ing] a hostile educational environment.'
¶
Reprehensible as these students' choices were, the resulting actions should upset you."

"Rosenfeld sees parallels between the students of the 1960s and the students of today in their fight for more affordable education. 'Once again, you see students taking a lead role to promote access to higher education, to reform the university,' he said. 'Part of what the free speech movement was about was student rights to engage in free speech, but it was also a protest against university bureaucracy and a kind of indifference to student needs.'
¶
One student from the audience drew a comparison between the government's manipulation of the UC in 'Subversives' and the current 'tug of war' between the state and UC that is occurring in the wake of proposed tuition hikes. Rosenfeld believes that by its very nature, the university will always be engaged in this kind of conflict. '(The UC) is engaged in exploring reality and debating and trying to arrive at truth,' he said. 'This is very necessary for what it's doing, but at the same time it makes it very vulnerable to people who want to take issue with these debates.' He also expressed his approval of the UC's autonomy. 'I think it was very wise of the university and the legislators to make its autonomy part of its constitution,' he said. 'I think they anticipated these kinds of conflicts.'"

"Brando's retort was a harbinger of rebellion that arrived in force during the 1960s when turning 30 became synonymous with perfidious old-fogeydom. The provocative rallying cry of the generation gap was 'Don't trust anyone over 30.'
¶
Quick, who coined that?
¶
If you said Bob Dylan or, as I guessed, Abbie Hoffman, you are incorrect.
¶
The phrase is generally attributed to an activist at Berkeley College by the name of Jack Weinberg. A Google search reveals a story reported some years ago by The Berkeley Daily Planet that says Weinberg, who organized a campus free-speech movement, came up with the line to brush off an annoying reporter.
¶
Weinberg said the reporter kept asking who was influencing the students, fully implying that it was the Communists 'or some other sinister group.' Improvising, he said his group wasn't being manipulated by anyone because they didn't trust anyone over 30.
¶
That gem of a quote got picked up by newspapers and then repeated by people who were adept at getting under the skin of the establishment. That many of the lead radicals of the time were themselves over the age of 30 was an overlooked irony. Anyway, Jack Weinberg today is 74."

"Throughout the 20th century, there have been flashpoints in which the struggle to shape the university in the interest of a more substantive democracy was highly visible. Those of us who lived through the 1960s remember a different image of the university. Rather than attempt to train MBAs, define education through the lens of mathematical utility, indoctrinate young people into the culture of capitalism, decimate the power of faculty and turn students into mindless consumers, the university presented itself as a site of struggle. That is, it served, in part, as a crucial public sphere that held power accountable, produced a vast array of critical intellectuals, joined hands with the antiwar and civil rights movements and robustly challenged what Mario Savio once called 'the machine'--an operating structure infused by the rising strength of the financial elite that posed a threat to the principles of critique, dissent, critical exchange and a never-ending struggle for inclusivity. The once vibrant spirit of resistance that refused to turn the university over to corporate and military interests is captured in Savio's moving and impassioned speech on December 2, 1964, on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley:"

"1965
¶
March 5: A four-letter word and
¶
D. H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' played the leading roles yesterday in the University of California's latest free-speech demonstration. The action began at noon with a rally on the steps of Sproul Hall to protest the arrest outside the Student Union on Wednesday of John Joseph Thompson for displaying a placard bearing the word in question. While Thompson sat awaiting sentence in a jail cell, more than a 1,000 students turned out to hear Art Goldberg, a Free Speech Movement leader, protest: 'It's hypocrisy not to use it when you can use words like 'lay' with relative impunity!' Goldberg proceeded to show how easily the word fit into the language. But his audience was not completely sympathetic. Standing near a group of pretty coeds, Lieutenant Merrill Candler, Campus Police, scowled and mumbled: 'You wouldn't hear my kids saying that - not more than once anyway. I'd smash their teeth in.' After the rally, Goldberg tacked a sign up on a post urging students to contribute to the '---- Defense Fund.'
¶
'It's in here too,' shouted Michael Klein, 25, a graduate student in English. He held up a copy D. H. Lawrence's book. 'I'm going to read it aloud.'
¶
'You do and I'll arrest you,' said Chandler.
¶
Klein read the passage in which the word appeared and kept reading and re-reading the passage while six officers milled about him looking glum. Finally Chief Frank Woodward motioned to Klein: 'My friend, you too are under arrest.' ... By then dozens of signs had appeared in the crowd, complete with impromptu definitions. A spokesman for the University said there would be no comment, not even a one-word comment.
- Don Wegars"

"Their arrival in San Francisco is fraught with all sorts of cultural miscommunications, many of them surprisingly sophisticated and funny for an action movie [The Voyage Home]. At one point, trying to explain away Spock’s clothes, Kirk (William Shatner) tells an incredulous observer that Spock was 'part of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley' and is still working off the effects of his drug consumption from the period."

"[Angus] Johnston recently created a map to show the magnitude of student movements, revealing a few broad trends.
¶
Young people have rallied against the August shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson in an unexpectedly relentless and passionate way, and they are seeing some results, he said.
¶
People around the country are still talking about whether police are targeting young, black men.
¶
Young people, too, have been instrumental in the fight to keep steep costs for higher education down and for marriage equality.
¶
They are finding that their demonstrations matter and are refusing to be quiet, Johnston said.
¶
Social media also makes it easier for people to connect, mobilize and share stories of injustice, he added, pointing to the recent shootings in Chapel Hill.
'There is not so much an unanimity of agenda or tactics, but an unanimity of feeling that the path we are on is not the right path and that students and youth are not going to sit by and allow things to continue,' he said, quoting from the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California. 'They are going to stand up and put their 'bodies upon the gears' to try and change things.'"

"To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected president in the history of our nation, we should never consider youth as a barrier to leadership. Examples of the capability of youth are numerous and well-documented. Mario Savio, the college student who united the free speech movement. The Little Rock Nine, a group of brave, African-American high school students who chose to break the barrier of segregation. Most recently, Malala Yousafzai, a 13-year-old Pakistani who stood up to the Taliban on female education, was targeted for assassination and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Let's make Tulsa the next great example."

"The issue is passion works but, there are no longer people who are truly passionate about large causes. Studies show that only 6 percent of students are interested in activism, a good portion of the activism community consists of these students. This means that our activism community has drastically shrunk since the '60s when many more students were involved in activism.
¶
When activism first swept through University of California Berkeley, students took advantage of this opportunity and made a huge impact with the Berkeley riots for the civil rights movement, free speech movement, and against the Vietnam War." [Ed note: What happened in Berkeley in 1964 was not a riot; it was deeply planned and carefully enacted. Nor was it the beginning of activism in Berkeley. Records show a student mvement in the 1930s, and that probably wasn't the beginning, either.]

"'Berserk-ley' is what some of us called our city in the 60s when we were young and living the carefree life of protracted adolescence. We smoked weed, protested against the Vietnam War, experimented with New Age belief systems, supported the Civil Rights Movement and later the Anti-Apartheid Movement's Divestiture Campaign.
¶
We pitted ourselves against 'the machine' as Mario Savio called it.
¶
A visit to the campus Free Speech Café reminds us of the poetic power in this 1964 speech since the entire text is hanging on the wall, available to anyone waiting to pick up a latte or cappuccino.
¶
The Free Speech Movement is celebrating its 50th anniversary and apparently not much has changed. Not everybody who lives in Berkeley is a liberal but the majority is. The current classification as used by Business Insider is determined by one's allegiance to the Democratic Party and a preference for secularism.
¶
Other liberal attitudes include a relentless concern for social justice that is reflected in one's personal politics about gun policy, climate-change, abortion, minority rights - be they racial, cultural or gender related - and lastly but arguably most important, 'the government' and its role in collecting and re-distributing taxes. Ever since the Free Speech Movement of the 60's, Berkeley has attracted freethinkers who want to challenge the status quo."

"2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Freedom Summer. Those who are old enough remember well the social activism of students in 1968 globally, and the role students have had in supporting movements to defeat South African Apartheid, to protect abortion rights, to oppose exploitive labor practices and corporate pollution. Social action for social justice is not the problem here, nor is the problem that some social action is linked to discussion in the classroom, or that some occurs on the quad or in the street. Students are better prepared to be contributing citizens if they also have a passion to right wrongs. The problem is that too many of the anti-boycott activists (like too many pro-boycott activists) evidently want to suppress rather than expose those with whom they disagree. Likewise, some boycott opponents suffer from the same myopia they accuse boycott supporters of exhibiting, but in reverse (BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement] promoters are too often defense lawyers for Palestinians, arguing away the importance of things like antisemitism written in to the Hamas charter, so as to paint Israel as wrong all the time; many anti-BDS activists are too often defense lawyers for Israel, not even pausing to consider why the condition of the Palestinians might warrant a caring young person to exhibit some sympathy, or that actions of the Israeli government increasing settlement activity have real consequences, not only for the prospects of peace, but also for ordinary Palestinians)."

"They weren't attacking authority,' [John] Searle said. "They were just attacking a tradition of sexual repression.'
¶
Searle also noted that the conversation surrounding sexual behavior on campus has shifted from complete freedom to widespread fears of sexual harassment and assault.
¶
'The sources of ideological passion in Berkeley during the 1960s and the current ones are indicative of a complete transformation of the way students are thinking,' Searle said.
¶
One female Free Speech Movement activist and Sexual Freedom League member, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about her job, said that liberal ideas about sex were particularly pervasive on campus during this time and that the league was one particularly organized form of this branch of counterculture. She called the sexual revolution a series of acts of "moral disobedience" on the part of students, accepting and embracing things such as homosexuality and multiple sex partners.
¶
Jackie Goldberg, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965 and was a member of the steering committee for the Free Speech Movement, said she did not attend any Sexual Freedom League events. But Goldberg said she also remembers the changing attitudes toward sex on campus.
¶
'The notion of not having sex until marriage was the notion girls were raised with, but that was changing,' Goldberg said. 'The boys at Berkeley were very happy about that change.'"

"The Free Speech Movement marked its 50th anniversary in October. Back in the '60s, what began as a spontaneous demonstration of Berkeley students against a ban on political activity spawned one of the most revolutionary movements of the decade. Berkeley has remained activist to this day.
¶
A stroll around campus confirms the main subject on the political agenda. The Middle Eastern studies department boasts posters in Hebrew against the occupation and leaflets calling for the support of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement].
¶
At an improvised stand at the campus entrance, people pass out anti-Israel literature. Every Friday at noon, members of the Women in Black organization hold an hour-long demonstration against the occupation. The routine includes a pro-Israel counterprotest.
¶
At the Free Speech Movement cafe on campus sits Kumars Salehi, a German-studies doctoral student of Iranian origin. Last month he led the divestment campaign among lecturer union members. He says he senses that sentiment is gravitating toward the Palestinians and that the BDS movement is going mainstream, similar to events during apartheid in South Africa.
¶
When I ask him about BDS' real goal and a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he says, after thinking for a moment, that he's all right with Israel's existence, but it needs to stop infringing on the rights of others."

"'I understand that the Twain archives are primary source material, while ours rely heavily on secondary sources,' she says. 'In terms of real dollar value, that makes a difference. But I also can't help but feel it's also a matter of who Goldman was-a deported anarchist, a vocal woman. She made people uncomfortable. I find it ironic that the university is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement while it simultaneously disassociates itself from a foremost champion of free speech.'"

"In 1968, there occurred what French Marxist Henri Lefebvre described as an 'irruption,' during which French students, later in combination with intellectuals and labor activists, sought to overturn what they thought were unjust structures of their society. Meanwhile, in the United States, the protests in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had built on earlier protest and reform efforts such as the student-based Free Speech Movement, illuminated what Herbert Marcuse called 'The Great Refusal,' in which increasing numbers of people were beginning to disbelieve in the fundamental institutions of society and their continued efficacy. Jürgen Habermas described this as a 'legitimation crisis,' in his book of the same name. This accounted, in part, for the rise of the New Left."

"For example, the issue came up when Rock was asked about a protest that tried to cancel HBO host Bill Maher's December commencement speech at the University of California at Berkeley.
¶
More than 4,000 people signed an online petition to cancel as a protest against his views on Islam, which, among other indignities, he has called 'the only religion that acts like the mafia that will (expletive) kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.'
¶
I strongly disagree with Maher's smearing of an entire religion for the crimes of its radical fringes. But I also disagree with those who think silencing him would be a sensible response.
¶
As Maher put it, 'Whoever told you you only had to hear what didn't upset you?'
¶
Plus, the location of this attempt at pre-emptive censorship is particularly ironic: Berkeley is where 1960s campus activism was launched with its student-led Free Speech Movement."

"Susan Griffin: There wasn't just one click, there were many. I was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements and had experienced discrimination within them. Here we were in these radical organizations like Slate, which laid the groundwork for the Free Speech Movement, and men ridiculed us."

"1965
¶
Feb. 2: A doughty little feminist from freedom-loving University of California held her ground yesterday against the Establishment on the steps of a Powell Street cable car. Mona Hutchin, 19, boarded the car at the Market Street turntable peacefully enough at 2:30 p.m. taking a position squarely on the steps outside. The gripman and the conductor asked the coed to step inside, it being Municipal Railway policy to bar the outside steps to female passengers. Miss Hutchin, of 3031 Colby Street, Berkeley, simply took a firmer grip on the handrail. A crowd formed. Other cable cars clanged angrily up to the turntable. The gripman and conductor pleaded. Miss Hutchin refused to budge.
¶
'This isn't funny, young lady!' a more conventional, if no less aggressive woman shouted. Miss Hutchin's reply was to the point. 'This is an outmoded, asinine law.' Finally, with six cable cars backed up at the turntable and numerous side arguments raging among the crowd of 100, patrolmen Charles Bates and Homer Hudelson and police sergeant Robert McKee appeared. They too urged Miss Hutchin to step inside with the rest of the ladies. 'There is no reason,' she replied, 'why the Muni should take more interest in my safety than his.' And she gestured at her red-faced male companion, who shrank into the crowd. Recognizing a steadfast opponent, the three officers began gently peeling Miss Hutchin's fingers from the handrail. Protesting vigorously, she was taken to the Hall of Justice, remonstrated with and released. Wesley Mason, the Muni's transportation superintendent, explained that the cable car policy is simply an 'accident prevention measure.' Another Muni man said at the scene that men simply 'know how to fall better.' Besides, he added, 'It wouldn't do to injure a potential mother.'
¶
Miss Hutchin, who had this explained to her, was unconvinced. 'The law,' she insisted, 'should apply to men as well as women.' Officers noted that she wore, with considerable pride, a button reading; 'I'm a Right-Wing Extremist.'"
¶
[Ed note: Mona Hutchin was arrested in the Free Speech Movement and was a member of the FSM Executive Committee.]

"[Vivian] Rothstein: When I went away to college that first fall, Kennedy got shot. There was a sense that it was a chaotic political environment. We weren't being told what was going on. That engagement in the civil rights movement and the free speech movement gave the feeling that you could actually make a difference, that you needed to take a stand. I think we felt a sense that we could actually help end the war."

"Over 50 years ago, the Free Speech Movement raged at UC Berkeley as students demanded a university atmosphere in which political and social dialogue could be had without the fetters of administration correctness. Nowadays we face a different tyranny: political correctness.
¶
For many of you this admonition might be a shock. Certainly there are political debates, politically conscious and oriented clubs, and social justice lectures. If you doubt these words, I urge you to look into your classes where controversial subjects might be discussed. These subjects may include, but are not limited to, the taboo triad --the things we do not discuss during first dates: sex, politics and religion. If you look hard enough, you will find we at Gonzaga give too much of a clinical and accommodating approach to these and other issues.
¶
I have written about this before, but going through my last semester I see this more than ever. We at Gonzaga are too worried about not offending people, whether these people are students, professors, administration, visitors or trustees. Frankly, this oppression by way of political correctness is a symptom of a greater disease: the triumph of the multiversity."

"The Red Sun Rising collective disbanded in 1972. The women in the collective were drawn to second-wave feminism, and there are persistent rumors about the role that counterfeit tickets to the June 1, 1972 Rolling Stones concert in San Francisco may have played in the collective's demise. The collective is gone, but the posters remain. They both informed and reflected the values of an element of young, radical Berkeley in the early 1970s. The Free Speech Movement, as a marker, had produced no posters. A few years later, the floodgates of graphic expression opened."

"The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium continues its program celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with Art, Activism, and Technology [http://atc.berkeley.edu/]. An array of international activist artists and curators will consider contemporary issues at the intersection of aesthetic expression, emerging technologies and cultural history from a critical perspective. (Mondays, 7:30 p.m., David Brower Center)"

"Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.
¶
Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, recently wrote an essay commemorating the Berkeley Free Speech movement, in which she participated as a student in 1964. She now expressed a newfound skepticism in the merits of free speech. 'Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography,' she wrote. 'We [Free Speech movement] veterans … were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.'" ¶ [1/28/2015 note from Bettina Aptheker: "The point of my comment was not to abrogate anyone's right to speak or to free speech, it was to point out that depending on class, race, gender, sexuality and so on folks have different access to freedom of speech. The author either deliberately or innocently misunderstood and therefore misquoted. Those with more power have more access to freedom of speech. For example, as I wrote at length in another essay on FSM and women I pointed out with many historical examples the ways in which women's speech is subject to censure and disbelief because she is female; therefore, the point being, women in general don't have the same privileges associated with freedom of speech as do men, especially white men in positions of power and authority. My comments had nothing to do with suppressing freedom of speech; they had to do with who has access to truly unfettered freedom of speech."]

"UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks explained to The Huffington Post at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday why he 'disallowed' his students from stopping [Bill] Maher from speaking on campus.
¶
'I didn't like actually what he said about Islam, but on Free Speech campus, you don't disinvite somebody to come and speak,' Dirks told HuffPost. 'So we used it as a kind of teaching moment.'
¶
'Education is not about making people feel comfortable,' Dirks added. 'It's often, in fact, about confronting people about things they don't like, but teaching them as well how to engage, how to make arguments that ultimately will prevail in the court of public opinion.'"

"Current Redwood Gardens resident, Miriam, has lived in Berkeley for 62 years. Although more recently regarded as an esteemed local folk dance instructor, Miriam originally set root here, as so many others have, seeking a degree at the University of California.
¶
Before earning her Masters in sanitary engineering in 1963, Miriam busied herself playing tuba in the Cal Band, playing string bass and bassoon for the orchestra and even dabbling in theatre, landing roles in Winter Wedding and Othello. She also was an active member of SLATE, the premier activist campus political party. Among other valiant displays of free speech, Miriam recounted for us with pride that amidst her return to Cal in '64 to obtain her teachers' certificate, she found herself drawn to the breakthrough of the Free Speech Movement and passionate eloquence of Mario Savio.
¶
She later adds with a chuckle a memory of Savio running up the stage to grab the mic at the Greek Theatre in the middle of the university's attempt to soft-pedal protests. Not only did Miriam work in close proximity to Savio and other leading figures of the Free Speech Movement, she also personally testified on behalf of students' grievances at a faculty hearing following the commotion of the police car blockade, with which she was involved.
¶
'I climbed on top of the police car and lead the crowd singing 'Blowing in the Wind,'' Miriam recounted."

"Chapter 4: Moe's Books, Berkeley
¶
Four blocks from UC Berkeley and only a Molotov cocktail's throw from People's Park, Moe Moskowitz opened his eponymous bookstore in the late '50s. But Moe's hit its stride on Telegraph Avenue in the 1960s, when he built his stock up to 200,000 volumes and built his shtick up by being part P.T. Barnum, part V.I. Lenin. (Quick aside: Moe was kicked out of the Young Communist League for 'having too many opinions.')
¶
Moskowitz, who died in 1997, might have been a quasi-anarchist who supported the Free Speech Movement and protested against the Vietnam War, but he also was a businessman who built the store from a paperback hovel in downtown Berkeley to a four-story emporium on Telegraph. He was one of the first independent book sellers to embrace the Internet, selling books online in the early 1990s. He staged wacky events, for which he dressed in top hat and tails. He once hosted a midnight release party not for Harry Potter books but the latest Thomas Pynchon novel.
¶
Moe's spirit lives on, not just in the array of titles and appearances by current best-selling authors such as Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem, but in the store's communitarian spirit. That's because his daughter, Doris, now owns the place.
¶
'One thing Moe taught is that bookstores want to give back,' she said. 'He really wanted to make (the store) a cultural place. But you still need to have the books. We buy hundreds of books, thousands, every day.'"

"By the time construction began at Santa Cruz, the Free Speech Movement's Mario Savio had famously called upon the 800 protesters occupying UC Berkeley's Sproul Hall to throw their bodies onto the gears and wheels of the university 'machine' and grind it to a halt.
¶
That idea of starting an intimate university free of the heavy bonds of bureaucracy and entrenched thought, along with the beauty of the campus, attracted an impressive list of early faculty who had trained at universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Cambridge."

"He taught rhetoric at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as the free speech movement heated up. 'I remember Mario Savio coming to the house for dinner,' [daughter, Nora] Oldwin said of the movement's fiery leader."

"BAM/PFA shows about 400 films a year, and over his career, Seid estimates, he's gotten to pick and choose several thousand individual movies for over 1,000 different programs. A search on the PFA site reveals the ultra-eclectic nature of his interests: There are Seid series on the Free Speech Movement, punk rock, the early films of Milos Forman, Sergio Leone, pirates and piracy, video art, genetics, ecological sci-fi disaster movies, the appreciation of water, Robert Aldrich, Hollywood and the New Deal, and one simply called Eccentric Cinema: Overlooked Oddities and Ecstasies."

"Mr. Bendich's gift for oration got him hired to teach in the speech department at UC Berkeley, where his class was an incubator for the ideas that became the Free Speech Movement in 1964.
¶
'My father was steeped in the Socratic tradition, so he attracted the intellectuals who were interested in issues of civil liberties and freedom of speech in the 1960s,' said Jonathan Bendich, an adjunct professor of music history at San Francisco State, and the second of Mr. Bendich's three children. 'When I was a kid, Mario Savio came to dinner at our house. I remember Lenny Bruce pushing me around on my tricycle.'"

"As someone who took part in the Free Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley in 1964 and who has supported and fought for the right to press political expression in the city and county of Napa for many decades, I want to voice my horror and outrage at the cowardly, monstrous act of Muslim extremists in Paris who shot and killed a dozen unarmed people, including eight journalists and the editor of the weekly French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
¶
If Hell exists, they have truly won themselves a place there.
¶
When will the insanity end? When we will all recognize that we are all part of one infinite source of spiritual energy? That what we do to others, we do to ourselves?"

"The following year, students at the University of California at Berkeley formed the Free Speech Movement, grafting the tactics perfected in the civil rights movement onto the political causes of the New Left. Questions quickly arose over the boundaries of free expression at American colleges. Did direct action-heckling a lecturer or orchestrating a sit-in-constitute a form of protected speech? Did everyone have a right to speak, including bigots whom some students wanted to bar from campus? How should universities treat those students who occupied a building to agitate for political demands?"

"Founded in 1970 in the wake of the 1968 Paris revolt against the heavy-handed government of Charles De Gaulle, Charlie Hedbo was unsparing in its pointed and barbed satire directed against accepted norms and conventions of the time. It was fueled by similar protests in America that were at a boiling point after student revolts shut down universities after the American invasion of Cambodia and the killing of students at Kent State in May 1970. The cultural revolution in America and France changed both nations profoundly. The cultural revolution in America drew from the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley; inflamed youth at Berkeley and across all of America rose up in rebellion against 'fascist pigs,' to use a phrase that was thrown about easily at the time. Similar catch-phrases were commonplace in Paris during and after the May 1968 Paris revolt." [ed note: the term "fascist pigs" did not originate with the FSM]

"Free program on role of Mario Savio
¶
Historian Charles Wollenberg will give a free talk on 'Mario Savio as Orator-in-Chief of the Free Speech Movement' at a free event from 3 to 5 p.m. Jan. 11 at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St.
¶
Wollenberg, a Berkeley City College history teacher and author of several books and articles, 'will discuss how Mario Savio defined much of the spirit and ideology and many of the ideas of the national campus-based student New Left launched in Berkeley in 1964.'
¶
Wollenberg is the author of 'Berkeley, a City in History' (UC Press).
¶
A book-signing follows the presentation. Details: 510-818-0181 or www.BerkeleyHistoricalSociety.org."

"The group [McGee-Spaulding-Hardy Historic Interest Group] may be small, currently at just four members, but it has tackled and accomplished much. Members all live in the neighborhood and know something about each house and its architecture and history through a sidewalk inventory.
¶
They can talk for hours about former corner stores, buildings that were once horse stables and carriage houses, houses that were moved from other parts of town, and places where Mario Savio and others from the Free Speech Movement lived."

"Fifty years ago, administrators at the University of California at Berkeley tried to curtail free speech on campus. They quickly had a situation on their hands: Hundreds of protesters materialized, a priest clambered onto the top of a police car to quiet the crowd and students swarmed the Administration Building. Eventually, the governor intervened, telling the university's president to broker a truce. The Free Speech Movement was born." [ed note: that was the end of the Berkeley FSM]

"The book 'painstakingly re-creates the dramatic-and unsettling-history of how J. Edgar Hoover worked closely with then California governor Ronald Reagan to undermine student dissent, arrest and expel members of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, and fire the University of California's liberal president, Clark Kerr,' Publishers Weekly noted in a review.
¶
'Much of the focus of Seth Rosenfeld's masterfully researched history 'Subversives' is the UC, its students, and the course it charted through the pivotal decades of the '60s and '70s,' said Steve Mitchell, distinguished science librarian at UCR. 'Many of the events he chronicles were occurring throughout the UC. This is important today because a significant portion of the ongoing and current trajectory of UC remains shaped by the events and their aftermath, which Rosenfeld details.'"

"Conspiracy theorists of the left at the time speculated that the UCSC campus, modeled on the English college system, was designed to divide both the physical campus and the student body so there would be no central gathering place - like Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, site of the 1964 Free Speech Movement - where students might act out any insurgent scenarios. According to this theory, UCSC was meant by its founders not as a haven for progressive thought (or action) but a setting where any mass student protests would be fragmented out of existence."

"You all here know something about free speech because the Free Speech Movement was started here during the 1964-65 academic year on the campus of UC at Berkeley. It was a student protest that was unprecedented in scope. This is the 50th anniversary of the protest."

"50 years ago
¶
...
¶
BERKELEY, Calif. - The University of California's more than 37,000 students return to their strife-torn Berkeley campus Monday. Their embattled chancellor, Dr. Edward W. Strong, was released from duties over the weekend. For three months, Dr. Strong, 63, was the storm center of a controversy that has generated four huge campus demonstrations and disrupted classes. They were instigated by the campus Free Speech Movement which has demanded freedom on campus to espouse off-campus causes such as civil rights."

"Set close to downtown, the UC Berkeley campus is easily accessible. Here you can stroll along redwood-lined creeks or stretch out on the grass and watch the world go by.
¶
Check out the landmark bell tower (Campanile). It costs $3 to take the elevator and stairs to the top, but you can enjoy the sound of the tower's 61 bells anywhere on campus. Music plays at various times with longer concerts on Sundays at 2 p.m. Don't miss Sproul Plaza, which is near the Telegraph Avenue entrance to campus. A granite circle set into the paving stones commemorates the 1964 Free Speech Movement. The protest is also memorialized at the Free Speech Movement Café at the entrance to the Moffitt Library. Here you will find four wall-mounted cases with rotating exhibits as well as occasional forums, panels and other exhibits. If you do have cash in your pocket, this would be a good place to get a cup of organic, fair trade coffee.
¶
Sure, the best things in life are free. But caffeine is pretty good, too."

"At Berkeley, she became a political science major and an active member of the Free Speech Movement. In her 1997 memoir, Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution, Adler chronicles how her time at Berkeley shaped her life as an activist. 'Here politics was seen as a life-and-death struggle,' she wrote, 'and argument was ecstasy. Caring intensely was not only good, but would surely change the world for the better.' Adler went on to receive a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University in 1982."

"NEW YORK -- A nation, a workplace, an ethnicity, a passion, an outsized personality. The people who make up these things, who fawn or rail against them, are behind Merriam-Webster's 2014 word of the year: culture.
¶
The word joins Oxford Dictionaries' "vape," a darling of the e-cigarette movement, and 'exposure,' declared the year's winner at Dictionary.com during a time of tragedy and fear due to Ebola.
¶
Merriam-Webster based its pick and nine runners-up on significant increases in lookups this year over last on Merriam-Webster.com, along with notable, often culture-driven -- if you will -- spikes of concentrated interest.
¶
In the No. 2 spot is 'nostalgia,' during a year of big 50th anniversaries pegged to 1964: the start of the free speech movement, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the birth of the Ford Mustang and the British Invasion heralded by the landing of the Beatles on U.S. soil for the first time."

"On the Negative Side:
¶
Muffled Commencement Speakers ¶
One of the more distressing trends in higher education this year was the decision of some major colleges to disinvite controversial commencement speakers due to student or faculty protests. Ironically, this nearly occurred at the University of California Berkeley, where the Free Speech movement began in the 1960s. Shying away from controversy chills the free flow of ideas, a basic tenet of higher education and the academic dialogue. Schools should follow an open process of selecting a commencement speaker, allow input for students and faculty, make a decision and then stick to it. We must welcome ideas of all types, even if we disagree."

"GUESTS: Patrisse Cullors, founder of the group #BlackLivesMatter, with fellow organizers Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. She is also the founder of the organization Dignity and Power Now. She is an artist and activist, and a Fulbright Scholarship recipient, was named the 2007 Mario Savio Activist of the Year, and received the Sidney Goldfarb award. She earned a degree in religion and philosophy from UCLA. Patrisse Cullors has been on the ground in both Ferguson and St. Louis providing support to activists, and helped to organize hundreds of people in a Freedom Ride from St. Louis to Ferguson. And, Jasmine Richards, born and raised in Pasadena, CA., where she is an active member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, and is currently working on building a chapter in Pasadena."

"Although he did not directly address the protestors or his remarks about Isalm, Maher seemingly alluded to the controversy by framing Berkeley's decision to have him as commencement speaker around the University's history as a bastion of civil rights and the first amendment.
¶
'I recognize that this university, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement, made a statement by choosing me for this speech, and I would like to say I appreciate that, and I'd also like to say I think you made the right statement... Come on, it's Berkeley. I think I can speak freely here. I mean, I hope I can.'"

"Protesters have expressed any number of goals for that movement since the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. There are calls for justice, but also more specific, and seemingly achievable, policy appeals -- body cameras for police, changes to the grand jury system.
¶
'That's good, because that's something that authorities can respond to, and those are things that campaigns can be built around because they're concrete,' said Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
But protests then were accompanied by long periods of negotiation with authorities, Hollander Savio said. She feared the current protesters might damage their cause with their 'very quick rush to civil disobedience.'
¶
'Now it's time for people to think really strategically,' she said. 'Is it good strategy to sit in the middle of highways and alienate people who might otherwise be on your side?'"

"[Bill] Maher delivered the keynote speech at the winter commencement ceremony, where about 500 students were honored. During his 15-minute address, Maher mentioned Cal's tradition of dissent, noting it was the 50th anniversary of the campus' free speech movement.
¶
'C'mon, it's Berkeley. I think I can speak freely here,' he said. 'I mean, I hope I can.'
¶
The audience responded with cheers."

"Comedian Bill Maher spoke at the University of California, Berkeley's winter commencement on Saturday, despite calls for the school to cancel his appearance over his perceived Islamaphobia, the San Jose Mercury-News reports.
¶
Maher was greeted by loud cheers before his 15-minute address, in which he briefly mentioned the student-led protests against his appearance by ironically noting that it was the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement started at Berkeley.
¶
'I recognize that this university, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley free speech movement, made a statement by choosing me for this speech, and I would like to say I appreciate that, and I'd also like to say: I think you made the right statement,' he said."

"[Bill] Maher's speech was self-consciously liberal, taking the occasional jab at Republicans and describing his own upbringing in a liberal home during the 1960s. 'In my house, the only thing we did not have tolerance for was intolerance. You don't have to be a liberal, but if you call yourself a liberal, you have to fight oppression, from wherever oppression comes from, especially of women, gays, minorities and free thinkers,' Maher said, interrupted by applause. 'That's what makes you a liberal.'
¶
However, Maher did acknowledge that liberals had become less liberal than they perhaps once had been. He referred to his own reputation as an iconoclast, and thanked the university for inviting him to address the commencement on the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's iconic Free Speech Movement."

"BERKELEY, California - A group of student protesters at Berkeley managed to get their message of disapproval for Bill Maher in plain sight of the comedian during the winter class of 2014's Saturday commencement.
¶
Six protesters, each holding up one piece of cardboard with big, bright hand-written lettering, together presented the following message: 'Dear Admin, don't Maher our commencement.' The group had purchased tickets to the graduation.
¶
...
¶
One of the police officers securing the graduation ceremony told Breitbart News that the protesters holding up the signs for Maher to see would have been removed and possibly arrested for their actions, 'in the real world.' He said that student protesters at Berkeley are often unaware that their behavior at the university is not accepted once they enter the realm of life outside the confines of tolerance that are characteristic of Berkeley's free speech environment."

"Although he did not directly address this controversy during his speech, Maher praised the campus for inviting him in what he described as a statement in line with the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
¶
'Never forget that we are lucky to live in a country that has a First Amendment,' Maher said. 'Liberals should want to own it the way conservatives own the Second.'"

"[Catherine] Reheis-Boyd courageously invokes the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement to stand up for the First Amendment rights of the downtrodden oil companies and gas station owners.
¶
'It is, of course, ironic that the city of Berkeley - birthplace of the Free Speech Movement 50 years ago -- would even consider an ordinance that so clearly treads upon the free speech rights of the men and women who own and operate service stations within its borders. Even some members of Berkeley's own City Council criticize this proposal as a 'feel-good solution looking for a problem' and really being about 'making people feel bad,' ' wrote Reheis-Boyd."

"In his speech, Maher has a unique opportunity to stand up for free speech-not just on Berkeley's campus, but in America itself, where freedom of expression has had a terrible week.
¶
Consider the events of the past few days.
¶
Last Wednesday, students and community activists protesting against police shut down a speech at the Berkeley Forum by gay libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. They burst through the doors of Wheeler Hall, where the university had just observed the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and stormed the stage. Thiel-who likely agrees with many of the protestors' political views-was forced to flee from the ignorant, brutish horde."

"The Sixties didn't start in 1960. Rather -- as the comments by LBJ, Reston, and others indicate -- the years before 1965 were fairly stable. Most Americans in 1964 dressed as they had in the 1950s. Few young people sported beards or long hair. Colleges rigorously enforced parietal rules. Though the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley revealed rising restiveness among the young, the Students for a Democratic Society had only 1,365 paid-up members in December 1964. (The total rose to an estimated 80,000 by 1968.) Though white violence against civil rights advocates during Mississippi's Freedom Summer had angered many people, supporters of racial justice hailed passage of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act -- and of the War on Poverty -- and remained committed to nonviolence and interracial cooperation."

"Last Wednesday night, a group of approximately 50 protesters interrupted a student event with famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel, prompting it to end early before its question and answer session. As a UC Berkeley graduate and the founder of the university's libertarian club Students for Liberty, I could not be more ashamed of my alma mater. Despite being hailed as the home of the Free Speech Movement, it's clear that Berkeley still needs to learn what free speech is.
¶
At first blush, this statement may seem perplexing since protesters have just as much right to speak their mind as Peter Thiel. The issue at hand, however, is one of time and place. The protesters had every right to peacefully assemble and exercise their free speech in a public space. They do not, however, have the right to exercise their freedom of expression to silence Peter Thiel's freedom of expression. This is known in First Amendment law as a 'heckler's veto' and is legally prohibited by university policy.
¶
Just as professor has the right to evict a student who interrupts his or her lecture, so too could the Berkeley Forum have requested UCPD remove the protesters from the event without violating their free speech. Unfortunately, the heckler's veto was so overwhelming on Wednesday that Thiel fled the building before the Berkeley Forum could take such action. This so-called protest was not meant to promote free speech; it was meant to destroy it.
¶
If the protesters truly had intellectual ammunition to challenge Thiel, they could have raised their concerns in the forum's question and answer session and hear his response. Or, if they believed that such an opportunity was not sufficient enough to convey their message, they could have continued to peacefully protested outside during the event - as they did for a few minutes before barging in."

"Now, nearly four months after celebrations in honor of the Free Speech Movement began, the campus finds itself at the end of a semester that has been most recently marked by protests against tuition increases and nonindictments in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases. In both instances, students have vocally exercised their collective right to free speech.
¶
'Of course, there's an interesting connection,' UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said. 'The Free Speech Movement developed out of the civil rights movement, and now there is a resurgence of that.' Dirks expressed his belief that the resurgence of the Free Speech Movement serves as a bookend for the semester. While most people tend to separate the two movements in their minds, he suggests that they are not quite as different as many believe.
¶
'Maybe we have not come as far as we've thought as a country. There's a lot of justifiable anger and concern around the continuing racial divide and relationship between these two decisions,' Dirks said."

"'In a lot of ways, I learned how to protest from UC Berkeley students,' said [Kadijah] Means, lead organizer of the Black Student Union at Berkeley High School. 'I felt really connected to them.'
¶
Students are following a tradition of protests against racial injustice that began in the 1960s when a generation demonstrated in the streets, held sit-ins and got themselves arrested, said Robert Cohen, a New York University professor who is spending the semester at UC Berkeley as a visiting lecturer.
¶
'People sometimes forget that the Free Speech Movement grew out of the civil rights movement...and that Berkeley students had played a very important role in the Bay Area civil rights movement,' said Cohen, who is teaching a course on the 1960s and the Free Speech Movement.
¶
In 1963, Mario Savio and other students picketed businesses that refused to hire blacks. Savio was arrested for trespassing during a sit-in at San Francisco's Sheraton Palace Hotel. While in jail, someone asked if he was going to Mississippi to register black voters.
¶
The Free Speech Movement grew out of the UC administration's attempts to suppress the organizing efforts of those returning from Mississippi's Freedom Summer, says anti-racism activist Mickey Ellinger.
¶
'Students and others were outraged at the university making it more difficult to organize against discrimination,' Ellinger said. 'Like today, the protests mushroomed to other issues, but opposition to racism was at the core.'"

"1964
¶
Dec. 17: State Senator Hugh M. Burns (Dem-Fresno) chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, announced yesterday there would be no hearings at this time on the University turmoil over student political activity.
¶
A Senate investigation at this time 'would create a climate which would make it difficult for the University of California Board of Regents to solve the problem.'
¶
Burns said his committee is 'fully aware of the events leading up to the recent fiasco.'
¶
'The Board of Regents,' he said, "must decide whether to run the University or turn it over to a group of malcontents, silly kids, addle-headed teachers egged on by Communist stooges, or do as suggested by one of this group: 'Just keep the sidewalks clean.''
¶
His remark was reference to a statement by Mario Savio, 22-year-old leader of the student Free Speech, that the proper function of the University administration is merely 'to keep the sidewalks clean.'
¶
'From the volume and nature of the mail being received by the Legislature, the taxpayers of the State are very unhappy over the recent disturbances at the University,' Burns said. 'The Un-American Activities Committee will have further information on this subject in its next report.'
¶
The student revolt for removal of campus restrictions on soliciting funds and recruits for off-campus political activity was climaxed by the arrest of 784 sit-in demonstrators on Dec. 3 at Sproul Hall, administration center for the Berkeley campus.
¶
- Charles Raudebaugh and Don Wegars"

"Affluent students weren't the equivalent of oppressed blacks, Sproul Hall wasn't the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Berkeley police officers weren't Ku Klux Klan Kleagles, or, as Savio maintained, American versions of Adolf Eichmann. The sanctimony unleashed by the conflation of every campus controversy into a life-and-death struggle for justice predictably resulted in a complete disregard for the rights of others."

"My father, a UC Berkeley grad who was arrested in the Free Speech Movement protests of the 1960s, pushed back his chair and went to the window. Later, he would report he counted some 30 white vans each holding six to eight officers in riot gear. (The San Francisco Chronicle the next day reported 150 protesters, but not the number of officers.) My Bronx-raised mother unlocked the door and walked out to take photos with her phone.
¶
And I sat frozen over our uncleared plates. Dumb. Furious at the overabundant force and shaken by a mirror held to my own privilege and comfort. My everyday is not framed by an intimidating relationship with the police and security structures."

"Even as an ardent supporter and champion for commemoration of the Free Speech Movement, Hollinger acknowledges the certain romance that surrounds the Free Speech Movement and the political nature of the '60s. He remembers some detractors of the time saying that the idea of a free speech movement was the result of 'bourgeois conceit.' He also recalls the people engaging for the opportunity to showcase their intelligence and not with genuine fervor for the cause. With time, he learned how to distinguish the 'sanctimonious blowhards' from those who were real supporters.
¶
Ultimately, the Free Speech Movement was an embodiment of a certain aspect of liberalism. Hollinger says that the time was consistent with classical academic values, not just the intention of them. He recalls a space in which the sharing of all sorts of ideas was welcomed, when debate was anticipated, and minority voices were not shut down.
¶
'It gave me sense of what it meant to be an academic, what it meant to be an intellectual, what it mean to be a citizen, what it meant to be a more complete person. All of these things came to me as a graduate student in my six years here at Berkeley,' he says of the time. He emphasizes the fact that what he got most out of his time at Berkley came from the already established culture, the culture of intellectual openness and dialogue.
¶
In light of the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement and the brewing political tension here at Berkley, Hollinger offers this advice: 'Don't try to copy what we did. Go your own way.' The spirit of the FSM and the spirit of what is happening now are wildly different, and the same sentiment can't really be captured."

"On Wednesday evening, in the very hall where the University of California at Berkeley had just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, demonstrators shut down a speech by billionaire tech guru--and noted libertarian--Peter Thiel.
¶
The activists who broke into Wheeler Hall were protesting the non-indictment of police officers in the deaths of black suspects Michael Brown and Eric Garner in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY for the fifth straight evening.
¶
Shouting 'No police state--no NSA,' the demonstrators broke into Wheeler Hall as Thiel was fielding questions from the student audience, according to Adrienne Shih of the Daily Californian. Evidently the demonstrators were unaware of Thiel's opposition to intrusive government and his strong support for Ron Paul, who ran for president twice on a platform of upholding civil liberties against the security policies of the federal government."

"BERKELEY, Calif. - This is the college town where the Free Speech Movement was born 50 years ago, spreading across the nation with sit-ins, marches, demonstrations and arrests. So at first glance, the demonstrations against police conduct in Ferguson, Mo., and on Staten Island that gripped Berkeley over the past few days should be no surprise.
But the University of California campus here today is nothing like the one that became the symbol of student activism in the 1960s, with its demonstrations for civil rights and protests against the Vietnam War."

"Mario was an original thinker, not a stylist. He attacked the premises of the Cold War before others did. He went on to challenge the neoconservative assumptions about the 'end of history' after the Cold War was over. Perhaps his most interesting and still-relevant speculations were about Marxism and liberation theology, leading him to identify with what he called 'secularized liberation theology.' How did he arrive there? First, Mario and the New Left could not abide the traditional liberalism of many in the Democratic Party. Liberalism had reached a compromise with corporate capitalism that delivered a welfare state, but within the context of a Cold War corporate state dominated by distant elites. Liberals, at least as we knew them, were late to join the civil-rights movement, had rejected the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, opposed the Cuban Revolution and supported the Vietnam War."

"Berkeley burst onto the national consciousness in 1964 when students took over administration buildings in a protest against a campus ban on political activity that became known as the Free Speech Movement.
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The movement, inspired by students' desire to participate in civil rights activities in the segregated U.S. south, gave voice to many who would become political leaders, including Jackie Goldberg, a former state assembly and Los Angeles City Council member. It also spurred firebrands like Mario Savio, who famously climbed onto a police car to urge students to 'put your bodies upon the gears' and actively work to effect change." [Ed note: the referenced speech was delivered 12/2/1964, a month after the police car speeches.]

"UC Berkeley is known for the Free Speech Movement, and not all opinions are going to be comfortable. I'm very opinionated so I know mine are not always the most comfortable, but commencement is different from a sponsored event people can choose not to come to."

"After he changed his focus two and a half years into his education, he spent a total of eight more years in Berkeley. During this time, he explored myriad classes in disciplines such as French, History, and Sociology, studied for a semester at Merritt College to boost his grades, graduated in Sociology, received a master's degree from the College of Environmental Design, and most notably, played a crucial role in the Free Speech Movement (FSM). The FSM was a student-led protest that took place between 1964 and 1965, during which students demanded a right to free speech and academic freedom on campus. Throughout the decade, the movement had nation-wide effects on civil liberties movements, and it is the reason students can protest, rally, and even flyer (or 'leaflet,' as Stein and his peers used to call it) on campus today.
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Stein worked as the only paid staff for the FSM. For seven months, he worked tirelessly, seven days a week on coordinating the trial. He was responsible for organizing the fifty lawyers and 800 defendants involved. Stein describes the experience as 'exhausting' but also incredibly important and worthwhile. He was surrounded by people who asked crucial questions about the state of American society and from them developed his own critical view of the world.
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He summarizes the movement in two sentences: 'We were fighting to receive an education in spite of the system that was designed to spew out perfect GM employees. By giving ourselves the freedom to talk and think essentially 24-hours per day, we were able to outthink the university administrators who went home at 5 p.m.'"

"Garson entered Berkeley with what she called 'antiestablishment tendencies.' After all, she had honeymooned in Cuba right after the Cuban Revolutions. It was in the FSM that she really began to take an active role, though. Although Garson stated that she was not at the center of the 'steering committee,' her role as the editor of the newsletter helped form the voice of the movement. She admitted that if someone else been the editor, even someone like her husband who was quicker and more literate than Garson but away at the time of the FSM, 'the newsletter probably wouldn't have been so simply written, straightforward, and humorous.'
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Garson was also unique to the movement in another way that she only discovered after watching FSM, a play written by John Holden to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the FSM. Garson was among the 800 students arrested during the movement, and for her, this arrest came as no surprise. When viewing the play, she realized that many of her classmates had experienced many anxieties about the arrests like 'What will happen when my parents see me?' and 'What will happen to my future career?'
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She said, 'None of that ever occurred to me. Of course, it was easier back then. [Students] were just out of high school. We weren't people who fought hard to get into UC Berkeley. The question was not 'Would you get a job?' but 'Could you do something meaningful with your life?' The times are so different.'
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While now we may take the rights to freedom of speech on campus for granted, Garson noted that not so long ago, it was a general assumption that upon enrolling in the school, these rights were severed. Of course, she and her peers fought this. Despite the opposition Berkeley once had to the movement, the FSM has now become a canonical part of its history."

"While [Bettia] Aptheker went on to work for other political movements and causes, eventually becoming a professor in the Women's Studies Department at UCSC, she remained close to Savio until his death in 1996. She describes his leadership as being integral to the tone of the movement, citing his transparency as the most important aspect of the FSM. She remembers his commitment to clear, open communication with respect.
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'He told the students everything he knew all the time,' she insists. 'In other words, if we had a meeting with Clark Kerr, like a negotiating meeting, the next day we would hold a rally, and we [would tell] the students everything that happened in that meeting. We didn't hide anything; we weren't secretly negotiating anything. There was a spirit of democracy and morality, which I think was very much a hallmark of Mario's style of leadership, and I think that mattered a lot. It certainly taught me a lot.'"

"PH [Peter Haberfeld]: My arrest in Sproul Hall was significant for me. I was one of five law students arrested. I learned that law school was a very conservative place. Students and faculty were either not interested or hostile to what was going on in what criminal law professor, Rex Collings, sarcastically (and to the amusement of my fellow students) referred to as "Red Square."
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As a lawyer-to-be, it was an important lesson for me to witness the Assistant District Attorney, Ed Mease, arbitrarily directing the police to arrest our lawyer, Robert Truehaft, (who was observing the arrests) and have him locked up in a tiny cell at Santa Rita. It was good for me to see Truehaft defiant at all stages of his incarceration. It was instructive to experience the police being vindictive and physically abusive during the arrests.
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Finally, I learned a lot about how to correctly wage a political defense to the criminal charges of trespass, unlawful assembly and resisting arrest which, to the best of my recollection, were brought against us. The well-meaning liberal lawyers who represented us for free naively believed that Judge Crittenden would show us mercy, if we waived our right to a jury because his former partner, lawyer Stanley Gold, was our lead counsel. We should have, instead, refused to waive our right to a speedy trial, insisted on being represented by appointed counsel, not waived our right to a jury trial and not agreed to accept the results of a trial of ten defendants. In short, we should have made it as difficult and costly to the County as possible to dissuade it from continuing to do the dirty work of the University."

"What seems at first like a peculiarly unique revelation has to do with Stevens's experience during the Free Speech Movement. The movement started out as a cause Stevens believed in: whether or not the University had control over what materials could be distributed on campus (thus the name: 'Free Speech').
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Stevens says, 'We knew were going to do something illegal, and we were willing to pay the price.'"

"There were two events in particular that stood out to Aron during the protest. The first was when veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of volunteers that served in the Spanish Civil War, came to campus and spoke to the students involved in the protest.
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'They were telling us that we were important. That really impressed me, and I understood myself as part of a historical event. That really influenced the way I thought about the whole thing,' she says."

"'My semester of FSM was totally different; it was non-stop politics,' said Hollander Savio. 'I worked with Michael Rossman on compiling a grand opus called, 'Administrative Pressures and Student Political Activity at the University of California.''
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The publication gathered articles, written both by graduates and undergraduates, on repressive measures by the University, such as compulsory ROTC, loyalty oaths, and rules against political speech on campus.
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It was during this time that Hollander Savio met Mario Savio, the man she would later marry, and other FSM activists with whom she still remains friends. Together, Hollander Savio and her peers created a movement with an influence that remains on campus even today.
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'The rules we established are still the rules the campus operates under, and it created a space for campus protest,' said Hollander Savio. 'The FSM was an issue that really touched all political groups, engaged a great many kinds of people, and there was strength in the diversity.'
Yet in the present day, Hollander Savio identifies issues with the way campus protests have changed, in cases when fervor of student activism and beliefs conflicts with the legacy of an open forum.
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'I think that some of the things we established as principles are not really honored anymore,' said Hollander Savio. 'We were pretty strict free speech people. We allowed people who opposed our position to speak -- even at the big sit-in before Mario's speech, we allowed other voices to talk. [Many] students today have gotten to a point of not listening to people they don't agree with, and it's a concern of mine and some other people of the FSM.'
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Besides Mario Savio's famous speech before the FSM sit-in, the form of protest itself has been a large takeaway from the movement. However, the memory of the event and its success often overshadows the complexities and careful planning of the FSM leaders.
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'We did have a sit-in on September 30 near the beginning, but only after a month of negotiations. And we spent a lot of time organizing before the big sit-in in December,' said Hollander Savio. 'Now, it seems like [it's] sit-in first and then organize - that's not the way to create a big movement. I think some people act out of emotions, and it's understandable that they feel hurt, angry, or frustrated, but it doesn't seem like people think strategically -- and I think that's too bad.'"

"Last week was the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Sonoma State University's very own late Mario Savio, a philosophy, physics and mathematics professor, was remembered as one of the main spokesman with the Free Speech Movement during the UC Berkeley protests."

"Navid Shaghaghi, 30, of Berkeley said blocking a locomotive perhaps had even wider reach than blocking a freeway.
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'By shutting down this train, it will delay the rest of the trains in the Bay Area," he said. 'Now everyone will be asking, 'Why are the trains delayed?' Because of the protesters. Unless we're free, we will prevent the system from operating.'"

"It is puzzling that Jonah Raskin's "review" of The Essential Mario Savio and follow-up comments should seek to separate Mario from the anti-Vietnam war movement and from the New Left, with which his name is always, and, in my view, quite rightly associated.
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No one would-and no one does-dispute the fact that Mario Savio was more emotionally and more actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement than he was in the movement against the war. He had seen for himself the discrimination against AfricanAmericans in the north and the even worse oppression in Mississippi; he had worked, lived with, and been beaten up with AfricanAmericans. Perhaps most importantly, the moral purity of the cause and the morality of the tactics being used resonated with his character."

"BERKELEY, California -- As demonstrators gathered just outside the campus a short distance away, witnesses to the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley discussed the 50th anniversary of the Faculty Senate's vote to back the students' demands. That lopsided vote marked the success of a campaign by student leaders to roll back university rules on the content of political speech, and inaugurated the student activism of the 1960s."

"Nice people do not protest, angry people do; and right now, I'd trade every nice white person about whom Chris Rock was speaking for 100,000 angry ones. But not those who are angry at black folks or brown immigrants or taxes-we have more than enough of them. I mean 100,000 who are angry enough at a system of racial injustice to throw ourselves upon the gears of the machine, as Mario Savio once insisted. A hundred thousand angry enough to join with our brothers and sisters of color and say enough. A hundred thousand who are tired of silence, tired of collaboration, tired of nice, and ready for justice."

"Dec. 2
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It was summer 1964, and something had to change. Whites had always found a way to block the black vote, and the continuing harassment, violence, threats and intimidation instilled a deep fear in black southerners attempting to register.
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But the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, had a plan. They organized the Mississippi Summer Project, setting up freedom schools in the south to teach children about civil rights and advocate blacks' voter registration.
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Mario Savio, a student from UC Berkeley, was one of the hundreds of college students SNCC recruited from the north to volunteer. After experiencing first hand the terror and violence at the heart of the oppression in the south, Savio returned to Berkeley with the intent of raising funds for SNCC. But the university had put a ban on all political activism and fundraising.
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On Dec. 2, 1964, Savio spoke out to a crowd of thousands on the UC Berkeley campus. To fight for civil rights, he needed to fight for a voice.
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Dec. 3
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The following day, thousands of students packed into Sproul Hall to protest the free speech restrictions the university had in place. That night, 800 protesters were arrested. It was the largest mass arrest in the state's history.
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Exactly 50 years later, a different case caught the nation's eye, calling to question once again the origins of our Constitution and our concept of law and order."

"And the same questions that were asked about the Free Speech Movement are being raised again. Where is the movement going? What are the objectives? Who are the leaders? Is it helping or hurting black people?"

"Raskin's argument that Savio did not support the antiwar movement is absurd. Savio spoke at Berkeley's massive teach-in against the Vietnam war in May 1965; he was arrested at a sit-in against the Naval ROTC at Cal in 1966; and he ran as an antiwar candidate for the California state legislature on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket."

"THE FREE Speech Movement came out of the civil rights movement, which had created a small but significant layer of leftists on the campuses. It showed that, at different points in time, it's possible for radicals to win over their generation. That's the significance of what took place."

"But the young radicals grew up. Some of them even got old.
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Mario Savio married, divorced, remarried, helped raise a couple of kids, and ended up teaching at Sonoma State University. He died from heart issues in 1996. Richard A. Muller, an unknown grad student arrested with Savio, got out of jail, resumed his studies at Cal, earned his doctorate degree, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant, and was eventually a tenured professor at Berkeley.
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To my knowledge, and to Muller's, he's the only one of the students arrested 50 years ago today who became a member of the university's faculty. He went on to a distinguished career, in fact, becoming one of the school's most popular professors and making a name for himself in climate science.
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Muller was one of the few prominent academics with the courage to call out the global warming dogmatists for their excess in seizing upon the now-infamous 'hockey stick' graph that supposedly shows the rapid heating up of the Earth. When he examined its flaws, he wrote:
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'That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?'
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In 2009, he co-founded with his daughter Elizabeth a think tank called The Berkeley Earth Temperature Project. Climate change skeptics rejoiced, but not for long. Three years later, after doing his own research, he announced his conclusions in testimony to Congress and in a New York Times op-ed:
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'Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years,' he wrote. 'Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.'"

"At 2AM, Dec 2nd - the morning of the 50th anniversary of a historic Berkeley free speech protest, a protester was removed from Wheeler Hall on UC campus. Wolfie, a houseless protester who has been assisting OccupyWheeler, was asleep inside Wheeler Hall with the supplies (art material, pamphlets, snacks). Wolfie chose to sleep indoors because of the rain and to maintain the continuity of Wheeler as an open space. At 2AM, UC Berkeley police came, and removed Wolfie from the building, without sleeping bag and rain gear. Wolfie was taken in a police car, and escorted off campus, to sleep out in the rain without protection, on the morning of the 50th anniversary of Mario Savio's famous 'bodies upon the gears' speech."

"'Some student protesters from the rally who attended the commemoration criticized the event, calling for people to concentrate less on the past and instead join them in fighting current issues. They said that people should 'stop commodifying the movement' and that freedom of speech is still limited on campus.
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Cohen disagreed, saying that the past and the present are not in opposition.
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'This is public history, and these are hard-won struggles that brought this campus the right to free speech,' Cohen said.
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At the commemoration, students from Cohen's class read excerpts from letters written by UC Berkeley students during the Free Speech Movement about their participation in the sit-in and their resulting arrests.
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'Will you sit by idly as tuition increases for students?' said UC Berkeley junior Julian Marenco, after reading a letter. 'How will you leave a mark on this campus?'"

"This connection to the civil rights movement is necessary to understanding the Free Speech Movement. It wasn't just about the right of unrestricted free speech. It was about the university response to the political pressures from the capitalist establishment of California, which was trying to crack down and stop the mobilization of campus activists taking on the racist hiring practices of California corporations. It was an attempt to shut down the civil rights movement on campus that was engaging in off-campus activity that was 'illegal' by holding sit-ins against the 'legal' right of the employers not to hire Blacks.
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So the Free Speech Movement began in reaction to the university's attempt to say that students could no longer organize around these issues on campus. Basically, the university said: You can't even raise any money to support the civil rights movement in the South. You can't do anything that supports any 'illegal activity,' like sit-ins or opposition to segregation in Alabama.
That's the content of 'free speech' that the Free Speech Movement was about, to begin with. Plus, the right of the university to carry out what we called 'double jeopardy'--that is, to impose university discipline on students who had already been arrested and sentenced by police for participating in the Bay Area civil rights actions."

"BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - A rally protesting a series of tuition increases planned for the University of California drew a small crowd at UC Berkeley on the 50th anniversary of a pivotal event in the school's storied campus activism.
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About 75 people crowded into the lobby of a classroom building to listen to speakers on Tuesday after rain persuaded organizers to move the rally away from Sproul Plaza.
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That is where an earlier generation of Berkeley students held a massive demonstration on Dec. 2, 1964 and occupied an administration building to protest a campus ban on political advocacy. More than 800 people were arrested in what is considered the climax of the Free Speech Movement.
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UC officials blocked off the entrances to Sproul Hall on Tuesday to prevent students fighting the tuition hikes from staging an anniversary sit-in."

"A group calling itself the Open University will host a rally at Sproul Plaza on Tuesday afternoon, 50 years after student leader Mario Savio gave an impassioned speech protesting a ban on political activity.
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'We will continue to speak out against tuition hikes that have continued to deny Californians the right to an affordable education and against privatization of our public education,' the group said in a press release.
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Berkeley student activists have in the past occupied campus buildings to protest tuition increases. Coincidentally, the university is hosting its own event to commemorate the 1964 Free Speech Movement.
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History students will read excerpts from statements made by movement activists during their mass trial. More than 700 students were arrested during the two-day sit-in, the largest mass arrest ever on an American university campus, according to the school."

"On December 2, 1964, a little known college student gave a stirring speech on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California Berkeley. A few of those memorable words from the since deceased Mario Savio convey a vital message for us a half a century later:
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'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.'
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These three sentences reflect the power of non-violent civil disobedience, which in turn is a force that can help sustain democracy. Savio's words-brief, cogent and passionately conveyed-express how purposeful non-cooperation and peaceful resistance can redirect a misguided society. His causes, racial justice and free speech, are still important for us today. Yet I see another cause that calls for the same commitment.
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We are confronted today with a great challenge that was largely unrecognized in 1964: serious climate disruption. Again, the power elite are failing to muster an adequate response. Facing unacceptable consequences, the rest of us must take action."

"At a campus reunion this fall, [Jackie] Goldberg pontificated, 'Every morning, get up and look in the mirror as you are brushing those dentures and say to yourself, 'I will not be cynical today. I will not believe the crap that everyone is in it for themselves. I will not believe that everyone is corrupt. I will not believe the propaganda that tells me it is all hopeless. It is never hopeless.''"

"California students staged a sit-in which became the model for student activism across the USA in the 1960s. It all started over who could, or could not, use a small strip of land outside Berkeley's front gates. Lynne Hollander Savio, who took part in the sit-in, remembers the mood of the time." [audio]

"Lynne Hollander Savio, a former student activist and wife of the late Mario Savio, remembers the 1964 Free Speech Movement that launched a wave of student activism at the University of California, Berkeley and college campuses across the country." [video]

"Joel Geier explained in an interview for SocialistWorker.org:
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[A] minority of Berkeley's 25,000 students had already become engaged in political activity through the civil rights movement, and also in organizing opposition to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts...
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This helped to instill a radical political culture on the campus, so that when the Free Speech Movement began in 1964, there were eight or nine radical political clubs on campus that defined themselves as socialist in some form or another. They had a membership between them of 200 to 300 people and a periphery of another 200 people."

"This week marks the 50th anniversary of the arrest of over 800 UC Berkeley students, including Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, who were protesting the campus ban on political advocacy. Over 1,000 students occupied the Sproul Hall administrative building until they were rounded up and arrested - the largest mass arrest in state history - in the wee small hours of Dec. 4, 1964." [photo slide show]

"Savio's July 3 letter and a dozen more he wrote to Stevenson in the summer of 1964 appear in The Essential Mario Savio, a new collection edited by NYU professor of history and social studies Robert Cohen, who knew Savio and reveres him. Featuring a foreword by SDS cofounder Tom Hayden, an afterword by Robert Reich, and an epilogue by Savio's widow Lynn Hollander, the book casts a warm glow on the Free Speech Movement (FSM) and its charismatic spokesman."

"Fifty years ago tomorrow (you always have to get the jump on these things), free speech observers and radicals everywhere should mark the 50th anniversary of Mario Savio's famous speech on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Savio found himself at the center of the Free Speech Movement, which had begun protesting the university's ban on political activity on campus that fall. It is remarkable in this day to consider that a university could institute such a ban (especially in light of the ongoing protests at UC-Berkeley this weekend against tuition hikes, or, more locally, the walkout planned at WSU today). In a way, the widespread political activity on college campuses shows just how successful the Free Speech Movement was in fighting such bans.
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But back to the speech: It represents a sort of turning point for what used to be called the counterculture (the very culture that would go on to give birth to such alternative newsweeklies as Metro Times, for instance). It's a short but bold and defiant oration that says free human beings aren't going to be pushed around by anybody, from lawmakers and police to liberals and labor leaders. Standing in front of a crowd of 4,000 people, Savio described his meeting with university officials, who compared the president of the university to the president of a corporation. In a clever way, Savio followed this line of comparison to its logical conclusion: Universities were factories turning the 'raw materials' - that is to say, the students - into finished products to be bought by corporations, government, or organized labor. It's a fine little speech, made especially memorable by Savio's passion, the way he seems to be pulling together his speech on the fly, and especially by the closing paragraph, from with the address takes its name as the 'bodies upon the gears' speech."

"The ostensible reason the 'Open UC' movement gave for breaking off its courageous effort was to join the California Progressive Coalition to organize and plan a giant rally for Tuesday, December 2, the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), and the day that 800 students were arrested at Sproul Hall by police at the behest of Governor Jerry Brown's father, former Governor Pat Brown. FSM leader Mario Savio told the students inside the hall and the 6ooo students outside that day that they could bring the University to a 'grinding halt.' While Joan Baez sang 'We Shall Overcome,' the students at the sit-in inside Sproul Hall established the 'Free University of California.'"

"'I think about the Free Speech Movement as helping to end the McCarthy era and paving the way for the anti-war protests that came later,' said New York University historian Robert Cohen, the author of several books about Savio and a visiting professor at Berkeley this term."

"1964 Dec. 4: Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh urged yesterday that the legislature investigate 'who really is agitating these students and promoting this activity.' The Inglewood Democrat said he endorsed the action of Governor Brown in ordering mass arrests of sit-in demonstrators at the University of California's Berkeley campus. In San Francisco, State Senator Eugene McAteer, also a Democrat, said the demonstrators should be required to pay their share of this week's extra police costs on campus. McAteer, a former star football player at the University, said of the demonstrators: 'They are obtaining a free education at taxpayers expense and at the same time placing additional burdens on the taxpayer. If there were more responsibility on the students to provide financing for their education, perhaps they would not have as much time to spend in wasting taxpayers money for the enforcement of the law.'"

"Lee Cary has demonstrated on these pages, yesterday and today, that hard left groups are behind many of the demonstrations nationwide, and that Ferguson is merely a pretext for advertising themselves to disaffected people, while venting their anger and destructive impulses.
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Oakland and Berkeley have been meccas for the hard left ever since the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, exactly half a century ago, managed to shut down that institution. In response, thousands of leftist malcontents came here and stayed. They and their successors enjoy the same climate, scenery and food that attract so many others who are bent on productive activity. Many have found nominal jobs in government entities that enable them to make a living while remaining available for demonstrations, taking 'personal days' and 'sick days' as needed. Others get by on SSI, causal work in the underground economy, and some by family money."

"My personal involvement in this story begins in the late 1950s, when I was a student editor at the The Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan's student paper. In those fallow years, I was a developing idealist who did not know that the CIA had begun recruiting students for its secret war against the Soviet Union. In 1960, I hitch-hiked to the University of California, Berkeley to write about the new student movement there. In the Bay Area, students protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) were beaten, hosed, and washed down the steps of City Hall. They were developing the first campus political party at Berkeley, known as SLATE. They were fighting for the right of student governments to take stands on "off-campus" issues like racial segregation everywhere from San Francisco's downtown hotels to Mississippi. They were in the process of becoming the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam Day Committee of 1964 and 1965."

"The group voted at a previous general assembly meeting to rally Dec. 2, the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement and in particular the day that 800 students moved into Sproul Hall after a rally. At Tuesday's meeting, the group decided to collaborate with the Cal Progressive Coalition to plan the rally and organized groups to plan over the break."

"However, at the college which gave rise to the 60s Free Speech Movement, activists are finding it harder to keep students outraged long-term. Ultimately, their greatest enemy may not be The Man in the form of the University of California regents, but rather their fellow students' inclination to prioritize their academics and personal lives over radical action."

"Students at the University of California at Berkeley - home of the 'Berkeley Free Speech Movement,' in one of the greatest ironies ever recorded - are trying to disinvite liberal icon Bill Maher, scheduled to be this year's commencement speaker, again for insufficient cultural 'sensitivity.' Maher says he'll be there anyway."

"Instead, I want to focus on the potency of that little blue pin. A vital part of the protestors' strategy was to choose free speech as the designation for the movement. Who living under the U.S. Constitution would dare argue against the First Amendment: 'Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech'? You could wear that pin in the serene confidence of being a 100-percent good guy, on the side of the angels, in the company of a host of others, advocating nonviolently for American ideals. And you were not alone, but sharing those ideals and feelings with thousands of others wearing the little blue badge.
What was it Wordsworth said? 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.' Well, his French Revolution didn't turn out very well, but the F.S.M. did, and I haven't seen anything like it since."

"One thing I find admirable of campus protest at Berkeley is the way it tends to focus on concrete issues, without losing sight of the fundamental political questions that these issues embody. Even before the Free Speech Movement, early militant students praised what they called 'consequential speech': talking about key issues in ways that make a difference to people's lives. One example would be the simple and effective practice of attaching "Fair Bear" badges to the windows of those Berkeley businesses that treated student workers fairly.
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Typically, student protests have been triggered by real concerns with social justice. The Free Speech Movement itself did not emerge as the defence of an abstract principle. Savio and other future leaders of the movement had participated in the civil rights battle that the black-led student movement had waged in the early 1960s."

"The city of Berkeley has always been a hotbed of civil unrest. As it takes on 'Big Soda', we look back at its history of protest against war, racism, oppression, injustice and long skirts"[Ed. note: terrific images]

"In 1964, the UC Berkeley campus was roiled in a dispute over a fundamental free speech right: the right to politically advocate within the college gates. That dispute did not involve a comedian or a commencement speaker, so some may object to the historical analogies I have made here. Fair enough. But consider this. The semester after the FSM, Savio did in fact speak up on behalf of the free speech rights of controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. In March 1965, Savio sought unsuccessfully to convince the UC administration to allow Lenny Bruce to speak on campus after Bruce's arrest for using obscene language. So it would likely surprise Savio that the UC Berkeley administration today, unlike its predecessors that had sparked the FSM by repressing free speech in 1964, is taking a free speech stance by refusing to disinvite Maher while students have advocated disinviting the controversial comedian. In this sense one can say that on its 50th anniversary the FSM - or at least its free speech idealism - is occupying UC's administration building without a sit-in."

"If a commencement speaker is meant to bestow knowledge upon university graduates, then it's unsurprising that some students don't want Maher to be the voice on stage. Making bigoted comments, not surprisingly, invalidates one's ethos. Does Maher have the right to speak at the commencement? Absolutely. But whether or not he's someone who promotes the tenets of higher institutional learning remains controversial.
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Above all, this day is about the students, not Maher. This is the students' commencement, and subjecting Muslim students to this is profoundly unfair on Berkeley's part.
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UC Berkeley issued a statement that their decision to not revoke the invitation 'does not constitute an endorsement of any of Mr. Maher's prior statements.' Universities may not endorse the views of all their commencement speakers, sure, but this goes beyond a simple disagreement with Maher on the students' part. Maher is denouncing the existence of 1.5 billion people based on the actions of a fraction of them.
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'Real Time' racks in about 4.1 million viewers per episode. Maher's pernicious statements have evident consequences. If the argument for Maher's freedom of speech still stands, then it's no doubt that the UC Berkeley students are exercising their freedom of speech too by speaking up. These students are carrying on a tradition of free speech by voicing their concerns, perfectly in line with the anniversary of the Berkeley Freedom of Speech movement."

"Ever the satirist, Maher had a few barbs for the students. He pointed out that his invitation to speak at the commencement was part of the university's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
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"I guess they don't teach irony in college anymore," Maher said. He also expressed concern that the students didn't seem to understand that universities are supposed to encourage and promote the free flow of ideas: "That's how it's done, kids. Whoever told you, you only had to hear what didn't upset you?"
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Maher intends to go ahead with his speaking date at UC Berkeley, despite the controversy. And that's as it should be at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement."

"Waters is the proprietor of Chez Panisse in California, a restaurant regularly listed among the top 50 in the world. But it is the philosophy underpinning Chez Panisse - and Waters' revolutionary approach to food - that led to Time magazine naming her as one of the world's 100 most influential people.
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Her political awakening began as a student at Berkeley when she attended a Free Speech Movement rally. Mario Savio, one of the movement's leaders, made a speech warning America was 'becoming ever more the utopia of sterilised, automated contentment'.
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Waters wanted to challenge that automation. A year studying abroad in France provided the inspiration for her activism - and a lifelong love of food. She opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, adopting a very different approach to the traditional French fine dining that was popular at the time.
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'When I started the restaurant I was definitely part of a counter culture,' Waters says who was discouraged by the political system of that time. 'I thought: 'I will just open a restaurant and we will bring people around a table and discuss the politics of the day'. I really thought of it as a sort of delicious forum for encouraging people to do the right thing.'"

"Shortly after these efforts began, Maher openly defended himself, saying that even his most critical guest, Reza Aslan - who is a Muslim - believes that he is not a bigot. Furthermore, he said the Berkeley protests are ironic because the university is about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its own Free Speech Movement.
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While some progressives, including myself, agree with Maher's critiques of religion and support his right to free speech without obstructionism caused by political correctness, there are many left-wing news and blog websites that have openly criticized Maher for his arguments against the Islamic religion.
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It's curious, though, that these same websites glorify Maher whenever he makes a claim that neatly aligns with the current progressive zeitgeist. In fact, they will run pieces, not too far from each other, that both raise him onto a high pedestal and attack him for being bigoted, narrow-minded, sexist and Islamophobic."

"Maher observed 'I guess they don't teach irony in college any more.' But this is no laughing matter. What prompted the move to disinvite Maher were his comments about Islam and the argument he had with Ben Affleck on the subject. The controversy recalls the brouhaha when Brandeis University cancelled writer and women's rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali's commencement address last spring in response to student protests about her criticism of Muslim fundamentalism. The difference is that Brandeis caved to protest, while the current administration at U.C. Berkeley (craven 50 years ago in the face of outside political pressure) is standing by its invitation.
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The coalition seeking to disinvite Maher, calling him 'a blatant bigot and racist.' But religious scholar Reza Aslan, who vehemently disagrees with Maher about Islam, defends him nonetheless, saying Maher is most assuredly not a bigot. And wisely the Berkeley administration stood up for Constitutionally protected free speech."

"'It's a byproduct of saying things other people are too afraid to say,' he said in a recent phone interview. 'I will say what I think is the truth. If it hurts your feelings, steps on toes, befouls the sensibilities of my own audience, I think they respect that. I tell the students at Berkeley, this country needs less conformity, not more. This should be a given, especially on a college campus.'
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Mr. Maher -- who will perform at Davenport's Adler Theatre on Nov. 23 -- has drawn protests over his planned December commencement speech at University of California-Berkeley because of his criticisms of Islam last month on an episode of HBO's 'Real Time With Bill Maher.'"

"Over the next few months, as the administration responded in a clumsy and often heavy-handed fashion - with police in full riot gear manhandling nonviolently protesting students - the Free Speech Movement took shape. As one of its leaders, Mario Savio, pointed out, the students drew a direct connection between the Free Speech Movement and the civil rights struggle.
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'Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights,' Savio said. 'This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. The two battlefields may seem quite different, but this is not the case. The same rights are at stake in both places - the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law.'"

"The slogan used by the UC Berkeley campaign against Maher is 'Free Speech, Not Hate Speech'. This formulation is a contradiction in terms: if you seek to prevent certain speech - say on the grounds of being 'hateful' - then you do not support free speech. Alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four's 'Freedom is Slavery', we can now add 'Censorship is Free Speech'.
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Marium Navid, co-author of the petition against Maher, claims: 'It's not a matter of freedom of speech, it's a matter of campus climate.' Her petition presents Maher as a threat to safety: 'We cannot invite an individual who himself perpetuates a dangerous learning environment… his dangerous rhetoric has found its way into campus communities.' In other words, safety trumps freedom of expression. But it is not like Maher is calling for violence; he brings no real 'danger' to Berkeley.
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The safety Navid and others seek is to avoid being exposed to different or challenging ideas. The underlying assumption is that students are fragile and easily harmed by a speaker's words. The recent academic trend of slapping 'trigger warnings' on course materials, so that students might avoid the 'trauma' that is expected to follow from reading them, shows that the university is being reorganised around the belief that the typical student is a pathetic basketcase."

"[Dena] Takruri told HuffPost that she was struck by the dilemma the students' petition poses for Berkeley, given the university's free speech history, so she zeroed in on an important distinction during the interview that not many have discussed in the debate.
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'To them,' Takruri said, "'t's clearly a matter of silencing hate speech, not free speech.'"

"In Maher’s case as in Hirsi Ali’s, the grounds of complaint was the invitee’s attitude toward Islam. Maher criticizes all religion, but he has said especially harsh things about Islam. The Berkeley Muslim-students group, backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, condemned Maher as a bigot and racist. On his Friday Real Time program, Bill Maher delivered a scathing reply to the campus protesters. He noted the seeming irony that all this was occurring at Berkeley during the 50th anniversary year of the famed Berkeley Free Speech Movement."

"The absurdity of trying to silence a commencement speech by Bill Maher on campus, in the aftermath of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, is a throwback to the HUAC and McCarthy era of the 1950's. The reaction against a differing opinion is a screaming fit that overlooks evidence within recent history.
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Why is it that American students, whose parents spend copious amounts of money to have them educated, or who take out astronomical debts for their own education, cannot remember the history of their parents or their century? While they may pontificate on American history for the past 250 years they cannot seem to fit together the evidence of the last 100 years."

"'They invited me because it was the 50th anniversary of something that is legendary on that campus, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement,' he said, referring to influential student protests against rules that limited on-campus activism. 'I guess they don't teach irony in college anymore.'"

"MINUTES OF THE 146th ANNUAL HALLOWEEN BOARD MEETING OF THE UC BERKELEY CHAPTER OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF GHOSTS (SAG) (WE CAME FIRST, YOU CHANGE IT, POMPOUS ACTORS)
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- FRIDAY, OCT. 31, 2014 -
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LOCATION: NORMAL MEETING SITE IN BASEMENT OF BOWLES HALL HAS BEEN CHANGED TO HEARST ANNEX THIS YEAR DUE TO CONSTRUCTION/SOLIDARITY WITH THE WOMEN'S FIELD HOCKEY TEAM.
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Council convened at 11:30 AM, board President Mario Savio presiding. Present were board members John Paul (J.P.) Dwinelle; Paul John (P.J.) Dwinelle; Pappy Waldorf; Suzie Sullivan (Panhellenic president 1948); Tom, founder of MySpace; and newly elected board member ghost of Cloyne Court Hotel (CCH)."

"The 'values of U.C. Berkeley,' as championed by the Free Speech Movement, mean you can say things that are not approved by the authorities, be they administrators or a clique of humor-curdled censors. Those nearly 800 people who were arrested outside Sproul Hall in 1964 didn't get cuffed so that a few Berkeley students could muzzle a comedian in 2014."

"UC Berkeley officials defended their decision and alluded to the campus' famous history as the home of the free speech movement in 1964.
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'It should be noted that this decision does not constitute an endorsement of any of Mr. Maher's prior statements: indeed, the administration's position on Mr. Maher's opinions and perspectives is irrelevant in this context, since we fully respect and support his right to express them. More broadly, this university has not in the past and will not in the future shy away from hosting speakers who some deem provocative.'"

"I never thought I would see the day when college administrators - at UC Berkeley, no less -- showed more respect for free expression than university students, who should need no protection from opposing views. Dirks did academia proud. As for those students who tried to muzzle Maher and the gutless ones who caved into their tactics, I don't know what they learned in the course of their expensive education."

"Stoner grew up in the Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Altoona and was 12 years old during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley - truly a world away. He was a kid fascinated by college students' idealism and their lively protests over the university's decision that political activities must be kept off the campus. Stoner later would write his dissertation on the seminal student uprising and 'the innovation of new rhetorical visions.'"

"A counter-petition, signed by 74 people as of early this morning, urged Berkeley to stand by the invitation.
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'We believe that the most effective response to offensive or misguided speech is not forced silence, but rather the response that Berkeley has always embraced: vigorous, critical engagement by opposing ideas,' says the counter-petition. 'We further believe that the entire academy suffers when unpopular or inflammatory ideas are denied a voice simply because their expression may cause offense or emotional pain to others. We therefore call upon our colleagues to respond to Mr. Maher's visit not with a call to forced silence, but as an opportunity to raise awareness across campus and beyond as to their own opposing views.'
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The counter-petition is illustrated by an image of the cafe at Berkeley that honors the university's Free Speech Movement."

"See, you have to live a while, get kicked in the head a few times, fall on your face more than once, get caught in a self-manufactured disaster or two, and then wisdom - mercifully - begins to take root. Thus, the older you are, the smarter you should be, and the younger you are, the dumber you are! That too, it appears, is a scientific fact (It was Jack Weinberg in the 1960s who said, 'Don't trust anyone over 30' -- a marvelous anti-establishment statement. But Jack is now closer to 80 than 30, and I bet he would no longer stand by that statement).
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Yes, youth gives us much of what we need: Audacity, vision, zeal, holy rebellion, and a good, healthy dose of revolutionary chaos from time to time. But like a fine wine, only time gives us wisdom."

"[Curtis] Karnow's father, a foreign service officer named Jack Andrew, was class president at UC Berkeley in 1948. He led the first campus sit-in to protest treatment of employees suspected of being Communists, laying the groundwork for the Free Speech Movement 16 years later. Andrew died of hepatitis in Vietnam in 1955, the year the war began. Karnow was just 2 years old."

"The University of California, Berkeley, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement this fall, but some students aren't happy having an outspoken free-speech advocate on campus. Following news Tuesday that Bill Maher has been tapped to deliver the keynote address at UC Berkeley's graduation in December, critics of the liberal, antireligious rabble-rouser launched a petition this week demanding that the school reconsider."

"On October 1, Free Speech day in California, former National Security Agency subcontractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden sent the following message to veterans of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. It was read aloud on the Savio Steps by FSM vet Jack Radey during a rally marking the 50th anniversary of the day students surrounded a police car to prevent the arrest of a political activist who had been tabling for the Congress of Racial Equality."

"Gar Smith reports on hitherto unknown aspects of the Free Speech Movement 50th anniversary ceremonies at UC Berkeley:
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The rally on Oct. 1, which was Free Speech Day in California, included a message from Edward Snowden, read aloud. His message included reference to Mario Savio's 1964 statement: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part.'
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In other notes from the campus, Smith says he was talking with a fellow veteran of the movement when she cut short the conversation, rushing away and saying, 'Excuse me! I just spotted someone I used to sleep with.'
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P.S.: As to the confluence of political principle and personal impulse, let's turn to the University of California Press' new book, 'The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America.' In an August 1964 letter to fellow civil rights crusader Cheryl Stevenson, written from Jackson, Miss., where Savio was staying with a family while waiting to testify in the trial of some Klansmen: 'This week has been one of steadily increasing loneliness. ... I play a little game with myself of trying to bring before my mind images of your appearance and gestures, the way you laugh, the way you hold a cigarette. It's a comfort to know you're alive.' (His next letter to her, full of commentary about the trial, ends, 'Looking forward to seeing you - hope your hair has grown!')"

"In the home of the Free Speech Movement at the U.C. Berkeley campus, students got a rude awakening when what they describe as an administrator [Steve Lindow, the first researcher to do field trials of a Genetically Modified Organism (GMOs), who is now the Executive Associate Dean in the College of Natural Resources.] 'with clear political motivations' shut down the Beehive Collective's art project on drought and Proposition 1, Governor Jerry Brown's $7.5 billion water bond."

"It's not only the Free Speech Movement anniversary that has been capturing the attention of the UC Berkeley community. On the same day as the commemorative rally for that occasion, Steve Finacom attended the opening of the library's 'Birds Do It, Bees Do It' exhibition, about sex education. The first speaker was Robin Mills, who is the campus' sexual health educator and was introduced as the "sex goddess." Then Professor of Public Health Malcolm Potts came to the podium, proclaiming, 'It's a pleasure to follow the 'sex goddess.' I'm the professor with the condom tie.'"

"Fifty years later, some former radical students have become disillusioned with the FSM. Sol Stern, writing in City Journal, reports that the cultural worldview of the New Left, which organized the FSM, is now the reigning orthodoxy at Berkeley."

"To advance the cause of absolute equality based on gender, race and class, the New Left boldly restricts freedom. It’s all about power — or as Bettina Aptheker, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and a former FSM leader, says, '[T]he wisdom of true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.'"

"'Prior to the Free Speech Movement,' Weinberg said, 'there was a massive civil rights movement that had already polarized American society. And when the FSM started, it was just another manifestation of the civil rights movement on campus….The students were mobilizing in support of civil rights but ended up becoming empowered beyond civil rights. So it was a turning point.'

"In 1964, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, became the first large-scale campus student movement in the country. The demonstrations set the stage for the anti-Vietnam War movement, the campaign for women's equality and others. Special correspondent Spencer Michaels looks at the evolution of student protest at Berkeley and beyond." [video and transcript]

"As U.C. Berkeley celebrates the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement this month, a long-simmering feud over funding for the Emma Goldman Papers - an archival project dedicated to the life and work of the iconic Jewish radical and free speech advocate - is coming to a head.
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After 34 years of U.C. Berkeley affiliation, and more than $1.2 million of funding spread across the decades, the project could be reaching the end of the line.
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The university has informed the project's editor and director, Candace Falk, that her employment will terminate at the end of October due to lack of funding. That decision, which the university's chancellor has deemed final, could effectively shut down the Emma Goldman Papers Project, which has been housed on or near the U.C. Berkeley campus since its inception."

"I didn't agree with Savio on many issues 50 years ago, but on the most important issue - the sanctity of free speech - he was right and I was wrong. My interpretation of what that means is simple: Short of inciting panic or violence, there are no words that should be prohibited on college campuses or anywhere else in this country."

"By successfully demolishing the wall of separation that President Clark Kerr insisted should exist between academia and direct action for social justice, the participants in the FSM recreated from scratch the image of the university-educated citizen of the United States. Berkeley might have been the most radical example, but every college student was affected. No education is possible without an elevation of conscience, but it has taken the last half century for that truth to take hold."

"'I was surprised when I was looking at the tables on Sproul (during a recent visit),' said Jo Freeman, the author of 'At Berkeley in the Sixties' and an FSM veteran. 'All those tables are a result of what we did.'"

"Students largely agree that Free Speech is still an issue today, though the nature of the issue has changed. Efforts to suppress free speech are now couched in polite, euphemistic terms. When Occupy encampments were forcibly torn down in 2011, reasons of 'public health and safety' were cited as justifications. Chancellor Dirks' call for civility recently aroused controversy because it raised the question: Is free speech protected insofar as it is 'civil'? Who is responsible for determining what constitutes 'civil' free speech?"

"Cohen's book - his ninth on the era - contextualizes Savio's letters and speeches to chronicle the history of two key moments of 1960s: the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In doing so, Cohen illustrates Savio in a manner that contrasts the image that the media - both that of the 1960s and of today - often portrays Savio. The 21-year-old philosophy major and new transfer student at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1964 was neither the singular leader, god-like figure or communist brainwasher of the FSM that some may have been led to believe."

"While many male activists gained experience from joining groups such as the Freedom Riders, who challenged Jim Crow laws by riding segregated buses in the South, the culture was less permissive about letting females set off alone, according to Oregon State University professor emeritus Jean Moule, a veteran of the movement. As a result, many came into FSM and other activist movements lacking the organizing skills gained from such participation, leaving them less prepared from the start and making it harder for their voices to be heard at meetings.
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'It was a reflection of the times that there were mostly men doing the talking,' Moule said. 'A single male had an advantage to make those kinds of decisions and get that kind of experience.'"

"Often, we see the Free Speech movement as if it was a honey jar … shoved in the back of the pantry until we need it. We never need to bring it out, and we never appreciate that it came from bees. So, too, we as Berkeley students often shove the FSM to the back of the cupboard. We pull it out as a signature of Berkeley's history and greatness. However, in reality, it was a time of struggle and discord within the community, highlighted by the Latvian, German, English and Spanish-speaking artist, and fellow Bear. The Free Speech Movement affected more than just Berkeley students; it changed the lives of Alameda county blue collar workers, Berkeley city residents, students and faculty. And as history would show, the FSM changed the country."

"This was not a moment that requires personal nostalgia or resists critical historical scrutiny for contemporary significance and meaning. It was a time when students exercised an important moral imperative and yet in the end joined with faculty and eventually with the administration to find collective ways to recommit to the extraordinary value, and values, of the university. Why would we not wish to embrace this history and continue to learn from it?"

"Members of the Cal Progressive Coalition come from many perspectives, but our overarching goal as a coalition is not to merely counter the university's FSM perspective. This would limit us to reactionary politics. Rather, we seek to use the FSM anniversary as an opportunity to amplify the struggles to directly change the material conditions of our constituents.
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As a member of the coalition, I look forward to envisioning what our university can be with current and yet-to-be-embraced collaborators."

"Meantime, the left-wing PC statist Boomers had taken over higher education, many state and local governments and the federal government. So UCB's official observance of the FSM has been a travesty of Political Correctness that is antithetical to true free speech, intellectual diversity and rigor, and any real principle. Sadly, that cancer has spread to the majority of our colleges and universities and much of government and politics."

"The idea that students such as those at Berkeley can start a movement shouldn't seem like such a foreign idea.
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It's possible on our campus to influence change and advocate for things we care about. College students have had an important voice in society in the past, but we shouldn't relegate that power to history books. If students today can shelve their apathy and overcome fear of failure, they can make big changes in the world around them."

"Last week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the uprising of students at the University of California in Berkeley against the McCarthyite clampdown on the speech rights of radical students. As one history of the movement says, university management's 'capitulation to McCarthyism' led to the enforcement of 'rigid rules' whereby certain forms of speech - mainly the allegedly dangerous, morality-warping speech of Communist sympathisers - were outlawed.
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Today, 50 years on, we could do with another free speech movement on campuses. For once again, one particular form of speech is being attacked, cleansed, censored and punished in universities. Only this time it isn't Bolsheviks who are being silenced - it's blokes. The new McCarthyism aims its fire not at Communism, but at laddism.
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The refusal to tolerate jokey, blokey, laddish speech on campus has reached epic proportions. This week something truly shocking happened at the London School of Economics, that supposedly liberal school that allows all sorts of ideas to be aired and discussed: a student rugby club was banned, physically disbanded, after distributing what some considered to be an offensive leaflet at the freshers' fair."

"Thankfully, this was not a 21st-century sellout. Social Slice, a student group working with the UC Berkeley public affairs office, was trying to generate social media attention for the noon rally last week. "It was our team's idea," 20-year-old Cal junior Megha Mehdiratta assured me. In real time, Social Slice printed out tweets with the hashtag #FSM50 and pinned them to a clothesline for easy reading.
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The old-meets-new tech mashup was actually kind of nice; you didn't have to bury your head in your iPhone to see what folks were saying about the wildly successful protests that altered the balance of power between universities and students, and ushered in a whole new way of, you know, like, being.
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To step onto the Berkeley campus is always, just a little bit, to step back in time. All these years later, the political and social upheavals of the '60s hang over the place like a fine Bay mist that never fully burns away.
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I don't mean that in a negative way at all. The Free Speech Movement midwifed some remarkable American moments." [ed note: nice photos]

"Given this shift in context, what lessons might activists of today draw from the experience of the FSM?
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Organize in person. Using social media has its cost. It's far easier to talk to only your 'friends,' but your group will isolate itself that way and develop a set of unrealistic attitudes. It is precisely the person who is not your "friend" who is important for you to reach and learn from. The people who organize in person on the campus today are mostly Christians. If those of us interested in saving the planet would use all of our techniques to reach out to and persuade people - marching through Sproul Plaza, shaking hands, handing out leaflets, establishing welcome centers where people could find ongoing community, holding innumerable small education and discussion meetings and continually reaching out - we would have an amazingly effective movement.
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Build alliances. That doesn't mean you send representatives to another group and ask for support for your cause - it means your members go to another group and help with its cause. This will build trust for your cause and interest in what you are doing.
Connect to the big picture. Lots of people care about saving the planet, but most of them do not see how what you want to do fits into that. Don't just tell them that it does - show them how. Express it in simple, bumper-sticker terms, and follow up in detail with credible evidence and arguments. If you can't express it simply, or if you can't articulate the details, you are not convincing. "Trust me, I'm a good guy" is not an argument.
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Fight smart. Have an overall strategy, utilizing multiple means to reach the goal, such as fighting fracking through public support, legal efforts and direct action. Pick your battles, and don't waste your energy. What are you trying to do with a given action? Is it likely you will succeed? How important is it? How much of an opportunity does it give you to gain support? What effect will this have on your network of alliances, on other strategies you are using or on your overall chances of success?
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Keep your eyes on the prize. OK, we know what happens: you get burned out and frustrated. You can't attack the distant bad guys, so you attack the ally standing next to you. You want to quit and can't admit it, so you create impossible situations for yourself or your group. You blow it all in drama because you are tired of the grind of struggle. Guess what? This kind of self-indulgence doesn't help. Take a break. The struggle will still be there when you get back. Ask yourself, "What is our primary purpose here?" Examine your motives and your actions with a consciousness of their overall purpose."

"There's a big anniversary coming up at UC Berkeley. This fall marks 50 years since the Free Speech Movement arose, lighting a First Amendment fire that spread around the country and changed America's political culture.
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That's the good news. But there's bad news, too. As onetime FSM activist Sol Stern explained at the Wall Street Journal, the era of free speech on campus has somehow been eclipsed by the era of collegiate speech codes. Today's administrators and activists, obsessed with the way words can hurt, care much more about limiting open debate than nurturing it.
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Unfortunately, America's current challenges with freedom go far beyond language policing. Even in realms of life where outspoken individuals and groups have relatively free rein, they're often earning the poorest of returns on their investment of time, energy and vitriol."

"Groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) have represented students and instructors in a variety of cases involving campus free speech and the suspected suppression of same. Their work highlights the fact that while the FSM may have opened the doors to campus free speech, the issue is far from resolved, and that some students along with faculty continue to experience suppression of their right to express themselves."

"With the past weeks marking the Free Speech Movement's 50th Reunion & Celebration, we want to know what's become of their kids?-the red diaper babies, and families of black panthers, queers, feminists, and brown berets? Host David Onek and guests engage in some intergenerational dialogue on who's on the picket line or possibly in the boardroom." [Ed note: guests include Art Goldberg and Susan Goldberg]

"FSM is not just nostalgia or, in the end, a play about a specific historical event. It is about how people come to commit themselves to something, despite the pressures of everyday life. It is not about activists, but how people become activists. The song 'Workin' in the Movement' picks up the excitement of that commitment, but also the strain it puts on people's personal lives. But the decision to come together and resist is a formula for how to build a better world. That particular message is bound by neither time nor geography.
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As the director notes in her introduction to the play, 'The promise of 1964 remains to be fulfilled 50 years later. Indeed, it does. Free speech is still under attack. Racism, inequality, sexism, homophobia, and war plague the nation. But FSM presents a hopeful solution: convince people to commit themselves, pack the plazas, and take the bastards on."

"In the meantime, one quick caveat. Free speech is an end in itself, for which progressives everywhere should fight. But it can never be a sufficient strategy for radical social change. Telling truth to power, petitioning for redress of grievances, and protesting injustice will not significantly change the balance of power between the 99% and the fraction of 1% that increasingly rules the roost. Changing that will take something more and different, and it will never be done by those who keep telling us how impossible a job it would be."

"Back in Sproul Plaza, Hollander Savio reflects on what was accomplished 50 years ago.
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'We gave youth in America a sense that political and social action is something that you can and should be involved in and you have power,' she says.
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Students burdened by debt may have less time to be politically active today, Hollander Savio says, but their freedom to protest remains."

"Michael Griffiths, director of public affairs for TheCall, said it was a solemn assembly inspired by a passage from the Bible in the book of Luke. He said the event aimed to promote unity between generations and change an attitude of rebellion that characterized the Free Speech Movement."

"BERKELEY -- While many commemorations of UC Berkeley's free speech movement focus on central players in the monthslong clash with the administration, a new project tells the story from different perspectives -- including female activists who dealt with sexism and a student who, after a Mario Savio speech, needed a breather from all the fervent discourse.'I had to get away from it,' UC Berkeley alumna Dutch Key told a historian. "'t was too intense. I went shopping at Macy's.'
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Interviews with dozens of people who experienced the free speech movement in 1964 and 1965 are being released to the public, just in time for its 50th anniversary."

"Maggie Downing, a UC Berkeley graduate student, spoke for the Cal Progressive Coalition (CPC). The CPC issued a statement advising the UC administration not to 'congratulate' itself on the FSM's legacy because, in fact, 'each of the major student struggles over the past fifty years made gains in spite of repression by the University.'" [ed note: photos]

"Thursday night, as the featured speaker at this year's Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, Jayaraman - now the director of UC Berkeley's Food Labor Research Center - urged her audience also to 'speak up, in the same way that you spoke up 50 years ago,' at the birth of the Free Speech Movement. And, reflecting at least one way activism has changed since the 1960s, now there's an app for that, courtesy of the workers'-rights organization Jayaraman founded post-9/11, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.
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The evening, coming toward the end of a weeklong 50th-anniversary celebration of the FSM, began on a technological note, as Lynne Hollander Savio, Mario's widow, read a message from Edward Snowden, whose release of thousands of classified documents in 2013 blew the whistle on widespread U.S. government surveillance.
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'Berkeley's unparalleled traditions of student activism and community engagement have been both a challenge and an inspiration to human-rights movements worldwide,' wrote Snowden, now in exile in Russia. 'They compel us to imagine the world that we want to live in and to stand up for it - and they show us that with vision and persistence, we can change the world.'
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That was a message shared by Jayaraman, who agreed that 'surveillance is the issue of our generation,' together with 'corporate control of our democracy.'"

"Trespassing on my neighbor's cat territory:
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In the play 'FSM,' which Joan Holden wrote about the Free Speech Movement and which played last weekend at Berkeley Rep, there's a scene where 'protesters have barricaded themselves in Sproul Hall,' writes Kurt Huget, 'and are about to be arrested and dragged away by police.' The students' song about what's going on includes a specific plaint, 'My poor cat is going to be hungry.'
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Aw, so those freethinkers had hearts, too. And they still do."

"An assortment of journalists was on hand to record the new event for posterity. Local newspaper and radio news reporters were there as well as a platoon of photographers and at least two TV news crews.
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One of the reporters was representing the Paris publication Le Monde newspaper and the reporter, Cerine Lesnes, mentioned that she was new to the area. She had been reassigned to the Bay Area because that paper had just opened up a news bureau in San Francisco."

"The occupation followed a rally that began at 12 p.m. on Sproul Plaza that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. The day's events were organized in part by the Cal Progressive Coalition, which includes individuals from Fossil Free UC, the ASUC and Students for Engaged and Active Learning.
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About 3:15 p.m., Associate Dean of Students David Surratt and Christine Shaff, director of communications at the campus real estate division, were planning on speaking with the protesters.
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In particular, the individuals occupying the building demanded the halt of commercial development at the Gill Tract, the release of all documents relating to the tract be released and a meeting with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, according to Maggie Downey, a UC Berkeley graduate student and spokesperson for the Cal Progressive Coalition.
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In addition, protesters are demanding that the development of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab National Laboratory's Richmond Bay campus include more student and community voices and that the work currently done there become unionized and meet fair labor standards, Downey said.
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Update: By 7 p.m., some of the occupiers' demands were met, including the release of Gill Tract documents and a meeting with Chancellor Nicholas Dirks."

"Maybe you caught a bit of yesterday's commemorative rally and student protest and feel inspired, or maybe you just want to be more involved in UC Berkeley's campus life but don't know how. It's not hard to honor that legacy today. The Free Speech Movement is such a crucial part of our campus history and atmosphere that it's important that we do our best to pay what respects we can to it. There are a lot of things you can do in your everyday life to thank those who took part in this incredibly important movement and to make yourself a part of their lasting legacy."

"Hollander Savio welcomed them and introduced ASUC Vice President of External Affairs Caitlin Quinn, who said the movement shouldn't be seen as 'ancient history.'
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'Fifty years may have gone by, but our administration continues to dismiss many of our concerns,' she said, pointing to the opposition of university officials to the student occupy movement on campus. She said now is the time for students to fight for their free speech rights.
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Farmworker organizer Delores Huerta, 84, took up the question of high university tuition in her remarks, pointing out that university education in Cuba is free. "If Cuba can do it, why can't we have the same thing," she asked, going on to call for representation of the community and labor on the UC Board of Regents.
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An addition to the speakers list drew cheers from the crowd -- a message from federal whistle-blower Edward Snowden, read by FSM activist Jack Radey
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'Berkeley's unparalleled tradition of student activism and community engagement have been both a challenge and an inspiration to the human rights movements worldwide,' the message read. 'The extraordinary mass surveillance capabilities and unprecedented government secrecy require us once again to take urgent action to preserve our free society.'" [ed note: good photo spread]

"'The metaphor of the machine indicates that the gears grind on,' said UC Berkeley graduate student Amanda Armstrong. 'It was encounters with police lines three years ago that led to mass Occupy strikes. We still have the power to shut this place down.'" [ed note: photos]

"Lynne Hollander Savio, the widow of the movement's main orator, Mario Savio, addressed the crowd. Another speaker [Jack Radey] read a message from Edward J. Snowden, who leaked voluminous amounts of classified documents from the National Security Agency, which said, 'Together we will restore the public seat at the table of government.'"

"It was autumn 1964 in Berkeley, in a small apartment just a few blocks from Sproul Hall, when I found myself interviewing Mario Savio, the embattled leader of the Free Speech Movement. I was editor in chief of the Stanford Daily and sent staff reporters to Berkeley almost every day for months. This was one of my days."

"Once the university intervened, in other words, the political dynamic shifted. What had begun as an effort to support other movements for social equity and integration quickly shifted before everyone's eyes to a demand for the liberation of students and youth and the democratization of the institutions shaping their lives as a prelude to broader social transformation. This is the F.S.M. whose message spread throughout the U.S. and beyond, catalyzing and exposing generational tensions and revealing the compliance-oriented program of American socialization. I came to Berkeley as a neophyte, a completely apolitical and uninformed undergraduate, just days before the campus controversies began. And because the events of the next couple of years became the defining experience of my life about which I have written and taught ever since (trying to make sense of it), this reunion gave me an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on and rethink that experience in conversation with this unique community of participants in this defining moment."

"Today's highlight in history
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On Oct. 1, 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at the University of California, Berkeley, as students spontaneously protested the arrest of Berkeley alumnus Jack Weinberg, who'd refused to identify himself to campus police as he sat behind a table promoting the Congress of Racial Equality."

"In 1964, the Daily Cal documented the student push to lift the ban on campus political activities, acknowledging the students' rights to free speech and academic freedom. From September to November, we documented almost daily the events that transpired on campus - from negotiations to sit-ins to the effect the FSM had on Greek life and campus culture. Unlike many other local and national newspapers at the time, we did not engage in red-baiting in our articles and are often regarded as providing the most complete and accurate coverage of the movement.
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Thirteen years after the Free Speech Movement, the Daily Cal filed a massive Freedom of Information Act request that uncovered the covert role the FBI played in spying on and undermining the FSM. Seth Rosenfeld, then a Daily Cal staffer and author of the articles in question, followed this work with decades more of FBI document research, exposing the range of influence that the bureau played on the Berkeley student movement."

"In remembrance, FSM veterans re-converged on Sproul Plaza, with movement luminaries such as Dolores Huerta, Jackie Goldberg, Bettina Aptheker, and Weinberg, giving speeches on the Mario Savio steps, named for one of the charismatic FSM leaders. Even Edward Snowden addressed the rally, albeit through a letter read aloud.
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The Cal Progressive Coalition organized graduate students and undergrads to create posters in front of California Hall, and then march through Sather Gate to join the rally. The CPC's organizing brought into conversation issues as wide ranging as civility, class size, deportation, the environment, food insecurity, fossil fuel dependence, the gender binary, incarceration, labor rights, Janet Napolitano, Palestine, police violence, privatization, rising rents, sexual assault, student debt, tuition, and the current actions in Hong Kong. Pushing back against the silencing these injustices perpetrate, they emphasized the need for free speech.
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The speakers, including Rhetoric PhD candidate Amanda Armstrong, emphasized the interconnections between and the need for solidarity across these movements.
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A quotation from Mario Savio, repeated in several of the speeches then broadcast in Savio's own voice at the close of the rally, brought the resonances between the movements into focus:"

"To the editor: The author of a book on Savio compared the reunion of some of the Free Speech Movement protesters to Thomas Jefferson coming back to explain the Declaration of Independence."
David Goodwin, Los Angeles

"Uniting students, workers, community members, and veterans of the Free Speech Movement, CPC led a surprise sit-in at Capital Projects following the rally for the 50th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. Capital Projects is the real estate arm of the University of California Berkeley that is actively privatizing public resources, such as in their proposed commercial development of the historic Gill Tract Farm. The CPC action sparked dialogue across campus on how the UC continues to silence students through the privatization of the public university and increasingly militarized police violence.
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The sit-in lasted through 6 hours of negotiation amidst speeches and chants that could be heard across central campus. Students, community members, and FSM veterans emerged from Capital Projects around 7pm calling victory on their first two short-term demands: a meeting with Chancellor Dirks and a signed commitment for documents that Capital Projects promised to share in May. The coalition came forward to the cheers of supporters who had gathered outside in solidarity. However, the UC continued to stonewall on any of the main demands, which include a halt to the development of the Gill Tract and a community process for an alternative design for a Food Initiative on all 20 acres of this historic farmland (more about the demands and the Gill Tract, below).
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As one student said, as she was emerging from Capital Projects: 'This struggle is far from over. This is just the beginning.'"

"Nevertheless, Carla Hesse, Dean of Social Sciences and a member of the campus coordinating committee for the 50th anniversary, wants the University to continue the annual lecture series dedicated to the historic event. Up until now, the lectures have been sponsored by the friends and admirers of Mario Savio, since he passed away in 1996. Hesse stated that the University will now be sponsoring an annual remembrance of the man who most influenced the FSM.
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'The timing seemed right to both its organizers and campus leaders to ensure it would continue in perpetuity as a part of our academic landscape and as a commemoration of a very important part of campus history,' Hesse stated."

"Q: In September 1964, when the Office of the Dean of Students was asked to enforce new rules prohibiting students from on-campus political organization and activity, what was your job?
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A: I [Peter Van Houten] was one of several male members of the Dean of Students' staff assigned to approach individuals at tables who were in violation of campus rules and take their names if they refused to end the tabling. George Murphy and I were the two deans who approached protester Jack Weinberg just in front of the Sproul Hall steps; this set off the police car incident when Weinberg refused to move and was arrested by the UCPD and placed in the police car. As I recall, only the male deans did this confrontational work in those days. Our normal duties - seeing students to help them resolve personal, academic and financial problems - had to give way to our rule enforcement work. This was not what we wanted to do, as this police-type work put us in opposition to the people we were there to help.
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Q: Did you support the ban?
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A: I am frank to admit that, at the start of the FSM, I felt the university policy was proper and wise. I was convinced that it was vital to keep out religious or political activity that might undermine the institution's autonomy and make it subject to influences that could make the UC, like public universities in some other states, a political football. I was an "Old Blue" fighting for my university's well-being. But as the months went on, the Dean of Students' staff grew to feel we were caught in the middle of a major disagreement between UC President Clark Kerr and UC Berkeley Chancellor Edward Strong, and when the events on campus became more serious, our confusion increased. I didn't know what to think of the inner workings of the upper levels of the university. I now realize I was wrong about the policy, that it was impossible to support in modern times."

"'Protest movements are very new to me,' said Berkeley senior Grant Lin, as he paused from autographing copies of his graphic red, black and gray poster on the Free Speech Movement of 1964. In Taiwan, where he grew up, 'people were a lot more careful.'
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Lin, who moved to the United States six years ago, designed the prize-winning poster for UC Berkeley's 50th anniversary commemoration of the FSM - a student revolt he first learned about at the campus's Free Speech Movement Café."

"Now, if you were to find yourself on Sproul Plaza today, you would be wading knee deep in the irony of the University commemorating the leaders of a movement they fought so hard against back in the day as they welcome back Weinberg and the other leaders to a rally where it all began 50-years ago.
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Mario Savio, who passed from a heart attack at age 53 back in 1996, will no doubt be quoted and honored by both those who were there in the trenches of the movement during the '60s and also by those powers-that-be who now run the University. Mario wouldn't be a bit surprised. He never doubted for a moment that, over time, his beloved school would do the work necessary to arrive at this point."

"'One of the things the free speech movement teaches us is that first of all, people can be educated,' Aptheker said. 'When that movement started, a lot of people didn't know a lot about freedom of speech or why it mattered, or how it was connected to effective political advocacy.'"

"Myth No. 3: The FSM wasn't about liberty, but about hippies challenging decency with their speech, dress and drugs.
[Robert] Cohen: This conflating of what was happening in Berkeley in 1964 with everything conservatives disliked about the mid-1960s (and, since then, with all that the right loathed about the late '60s) was first popularized by Ronald Reagan. When he ran and won the California gubernatorial election in 1966, he did so, in part, by pledging to 'clean up the mess in Berkeley.'
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One still hears echoes of this from the right. Just recently, a letter sent to the Wall Street Journal claimed that 'Mr. Savio's free-speech issue was his desire to lace his comments with the F-word whenever he felt moved.'
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Having just published a book of Mario Savio's FSM speeches (The Essential Mario Savio: Speeches and Writings That Changed America), I assure you that none of Savio's speeches contained the 'F' word or any other obscenity. There was controversy over the use of indecent words at Berkeley, but it occurred in 1965, the semester after the FSM. While obscenity issues do have free speech implications - as when books such as Allen Ginsberg's Howl was banned as offensive, or the comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscene expression - the issue of obscene speech never came up and was not a focus of the FSM in fall 1964."

"Fifty years ago, UC Berkeley students barred from promoting civil rights and other causes on campus staged a peaceful and relentless protest, demanding - and months later, gaining - their constitutional rights to free expression and assembly. Today, Sproul plaza is lined with tables of information for an array of political movements, clubs, religions, and causes for the hundreds of students and visitors who pass through the historical plaza."

"It will feel a bit surreal. The university that had 801 of us arrested is welcoming us back by hanging Free Speech banners on the building we occupied. Home like a victorious football team! But it's not a real victory because the people that tried to shut us up in the 1960s have a more chilling control over U.S. college students today than they ever had over us. Today it's not police control, its economic control."

"This 1st of October marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement that began at the University of California, Berkeley. On that day, thousands of Berkeley students surrounded a police car on Sproul Plaza and held it captive for 33 hours in protest of university bans against political activities on campus. The Free Speech Movement was an arm of the larger Civil Rights Movement, and it marked the nonviolent beginning of a decade of rebellion. The students and their movement reshaped national politics and planted universities as battlegrounds for public policy.
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On this 50th anniversary, it is important to reflect on student activism at USC over the last few years. Why? Having experienced student cultures at different universities, it seems to us that USC students suffer from a moral and intellectual crisis with unorthodox politics. While classes consistently emphasize politics outside formal institutions, the day-to-day campus is disappointedly empty of any substantive political activity. Challenges and protests do occur, yet they seem to be passive, temporary and even isolated in nature."

"Fifty years ago, Jack Weinberg was the first to be arrested in an unprecedented student protest over free speech restrictions on the UC Berkeley campus. Thousands of demonstrators surrounded the police car in which Weinberg was detained for 32 hours. Subsequent protests went on for months.
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While UC authorities had hoped for a quick return to order, a seminal youth rebellion - the Free Speech Movement - was born on Sproul Plaza instead. Historians say its national influence persists through decades of political activism, on and off college campuses.
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This week, the university that once sought to censor Weinberg and other leaders of that movement is welcoming them back as heroes and historical figures.
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Berkeley is commemorating the half-century anniversary of that tumultuous fall 1964 semester with lectures, classes, concerts, exhibits and other activities that will culminate with a rally Wednesday at Sproul Plaza.
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'Fifty years have passed, and it's pretty safe to be a supporter of the Free Speech Movement now,' said Weinberg, 74, who is a consultant to groups seeking to clean up environmental pollution. As in many disputes, the losing side now embraces the cause it had fought, he said."

"On Tuesday Sept. 23, Robert Cohen, NYU professor and author of "Freedom's Orator", discussed Mario Savio's role in promoting free speech and social justice during the Free Speech Movement. Both students and FSM veterans gathered to listen and celebrate the movement's 50th anniversary. [video]"

"BERKELEY -- The free speech movement turned 50 this month, but Councilman Jesse Arreguin, 30, is asking if lessons were learned.
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In his capacity as a private citizen and sponsor of Measure R, the downtown initiative, Arreguin was invited by the Berkeley Gray Panthers to speak briefly on the ballot proposition at the organization's Wednesday afternoon meeting at the North Berkeley Senior Center.
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But, as Arreguin tells it, when he arrived to give his five-minute presentation, Gray Panther co-convener Edith Hallberg informed him that the senior center manager said he should not speak, due to the political content of his presentation.
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Arreguin said he ignored the cautions and made the presentation.
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'Political speech is a fundamental part of the right to free speech,' he told this newspaper."

"BERKELEY, Calif. (KGO) -- From Friday night through next week, UC Berkeley will celebrate 50 years since the birth of the Free Speech Movement.
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On Oct. 1, 1964, students sat down at Sproul Plaza demanding the university lift its ban on political activism.
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Students attending UC Berkeley today know they are being raised in the cradle of the free speech movement. For most though, the details are sketchy.
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It was October 1, 1964, when Jack Weinberg, a student activist was trying to push for racial equality. He did so on the steps of Sproul Hall, knowing he could be arrested.
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'I had the good fortune of being the one they selected and when I wouldn't cooperate, they called in a police care to haul me away,' said Weinberg.
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Students who had gathered at the plaza, quickly surrounded the police car.
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'When the police car was brought on campus and people sat down on it somebody yelled 'sit down' and everybody sat down because we were used to sitting in. We had action at the Sheraton Plaza and other places,' said Lynn Hollander former student activist.
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The car became the speaker's podium and no one delivered the message more effectively than Mario Savio."

"Three veterans of the Free Speech Movement spoke with Michael Krasny on Forum Tuesday about their participation in this formative era: Jack Weinberg, now an environmental activist; Lynnd Hollander Savio, Mario Savio's widow; and Jackie Goldberg, a former California assemblywoman who spoke to the crowd from atop a police car on Oct. 1."

"'Songs have a way of revealing as well as healing, and of reminding us that we are part of the whole human condition,' Dane writes in an email. 'Many new songs and new renditions of old songs have been fired by the spirit of the FSM, so it is only fitting that we celebrate this 50th anniversary by singing together again.'"

"I'm looking forward to seeing old friends at the reunion. I suspect we'll spend a lot of time wondering if there was something we should have done then, or could have been doing more of since then, to make things come out differently. Maybe the indebted generation will figure it out and take our old adversaries by surprise, as we once did."

"So I wasn't exactly unprepared. On the other hand, this protest had been entirely spontaneous. There seemed to be no leaders; the only example of leadership I heard about was when some guy said, 'Sit down' and the people around the car did.
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Of course, there were people who had prepared for this moment, people who saw some sort of clash as inevitable. They were prepared for something; the police car was an opportunity. So nice when Authority hands you a stick to beat it with.
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And then the speeches. Who were these people, the ones standing on the police car and talking? They were the people who got to make the speeches. But the rhetoric, or at least some of the rhetoric, was effective. We believed we were adding our voices to a nationwide upheaval; we were supporting our brothers and sisters in wherever.
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(And we were, of course; we were not delusional. The FSM was a big deal; it inspired many other student movements. And student movements were a good thing; they blew a lot of soot out of the pipes. They made people confront larger truths. I wish I'd done more, actually.)
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And then Mario Savio spoke. Ah. I said to myself, here's the leader. The offhand eloquence, the clarity of vision, the gentleness of his manner - he was charismatic. It was the first and last time I ever saw charisma developing right before my eyes. Suddenly we knew we could outlast the police cars."

"'FSM was not a hate-filled movement, and so much of what came after was,' says journalist Kate Coleman, who was an undergrad at Cal in 1964. 'And a lot of it has to be credited to Mario. A lot of guys in the movement were arrogant jerks, but not him. He was so humble. I don't think I really appreciated that until later, as the left got ugly and started to eat its own.'"

"Writing in the Berkeley alumni magazine about the anniversary, Ms. Aptheker noted that the First Amendment was 'written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants. . . . In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography. We [Free Speech Movement] veterans were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.'
¶
Read it and weep-for the Free Speech Movement anniversary, for the ideal of an intellectually open university, and for America."

"During the historic Free Speech Movement period at Berkeley, beginning in the autumn of 1964, I was a graduate student in physics at Yale University. There was no doubt that Berkeley students were playing a leadership role for us all across the country.
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At Yale, the focus was primarily on civil rights. Racism and its destructive consequences were all around us. If you walked a few blocks from the Yale campus down Dixwell Avenue, the world changed from all White to all Black. I was deeply offended by this and, accordingly, started working as a volunteer, leading a group of teenage boys at the Dixwell Community Center in the heart of the projects. People said that it was too dangerous for White people to go into the projects but they were simply wrong.
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At the same time, we organized at Yale a non-profit called Southern Teaching Program Inc., which recruited graduate students from universities across the country to teach in the South in historically black colleges and universities. This was an entirely student based and led organization; we expected little, if anything, from the generation before us.
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As part of this, in the summer of 1965, I went to South Carolina and Georgia to teach and do civil-rights work. In South Carolina several of us from the Northeast joined up with two graduate students from Berkeley who had played a leadership role in the FSM. These were heady but also dangerous times. Indeed, just before I arrived, one of our group was murdered by an outraged local person in Columbia, S.C.
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I remember being very taken by the passion of the Berkeley students and also by their political sophistication. For them, the FSM was the single most important experience of their lives. It was psychologically liberating for them."

"The 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is upon us, and we're willing to concede that the founders of the movement had a good slogan-even if it pains The Scrapbook to contemplate the damage done by 'campus activists' since then. Whether the social and political change it foments is good or bad, free speech is obviously preferable to any censorious alternative."

"Margot Adler, a familiar voice on National Public Radio until her death this summer, read Thucydides while sitting in at Sproul Hall in 1964. The four hundred pages that she was expected to read for class over an earlier weekend would scare Freshmen this fall. As Adler looked back at Cal, readers had as much stature as the orators:
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While politics bid for my soul, another model, totally at war with the active political life, also beckoned. . . . He would sit in his home, surrounded by walls of books, contentedly poring over ancient Greek texts, while his wife sat at her desk quietly studying Anglo-Saxon. I wondered if they were outside the main energy of our era or if they were investigating the only questions anyone would find interesting a hundred or a thousand years from now."

"We were directed to the small room behind the parish church that Bob Savio shared with the lone remaining Queens College volunteer in Taxco, Kevin Donnalan. Kevin told us that Bob and the bishop didn't get along and that the bishop had ordered him to leave the diocese.
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Kevin was in awe of Savio and told us of Bob's transformation as he emerged, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, into a powerful speaker and organizer who had led a demonstration of local indigenous Catholics to protest their maltreatment by landowners and to bring their complaints to the bishop. The bishop was not amused. He was so flummoxed by Savio that he had threated to send the rest of the Queens College volunteers packing, as well.
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We were amazed: the young man we knew had been almost incapable of carrying on a polite conversation, but somehow was managing to reach strangers across culture, class and language. We knew Savio to be a modest and somewhat solitary fellow. He didn't much mix with the rest of the Queens College volunteers. He didn't join us on the one R&R weekend break in Acapulco. Instead, he came and went to Mexico like the Lone Stranger.
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We couldn't fathom how Bob had managed to stir up so much trouble in so short a period of time and what he could have possibly conveyed to the indigenous Nahuatl speakers. That he was "inspired" was all that Kevin could tell us."

"The Free Speech Movement affected national events as well. UC Regents fired President Kerr because they did not think he took a strong enough stance against the students. FBI Director Edgar Hoover used the movement as an excuse to bump up the agency's spying on students and leftist protest groups. A Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan used the student unrest as a wedge issue to defeat Gov. Pat Brown in 1967, thereby launching a political career that would carry him to the Presidency. And the Free Speech protests would radicalize thousands of students, many of whom went on to fight other important battles, including protesting the Vietnam War."

"Thus, war babies renovated the cultural and political landscapes. Their art and activities transfigured modern America. This book is a tribute to war babies. And it is definitely a tribute worth making, given the fact that so many talented musicians and singers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joanie Mitchell, Judy Collins, Simon and Garfunkle, actors such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, journalists such as Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, athlete/activists such as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, civil rights activists such as Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, John Lewis, Barney Frank, and politicians such as John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Cheney who were born in these years. They became adults in the early 1960's."

"'We changed the image of students from panty raiders to political activists,' says FSM veteran Lynne Hollander, the widow of FSM leader Mario Savio and chair of the 50th anniversary reunion. 'We were the first big movement on a white college campus. There'd been lots of stuff with black colleges in the South, but we spread that to the Northern campuses.
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'We didn't succeed in transforming the society to make it just and equitable. We still have a long way to go on that. But I think we contributed a lot to the sense that young people have that they have a right to have a say in the decisions that control and impact their lives.'"

"Q: What does it all mean now?
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A [Jack Weinberg]: 'Rights that were won on the Berkeley campus spread to other parts of the country and free speech in America and on university campuses was deepened. There are still attacks on it, but the Free Speech Movement commemorates a victory and is a symbol that encourages people to keep defending that idea.'"

"I'm going back to the Berkeley campus next week for the 50th reunion of the Free Speech Movement. You may have heard in some history class about Mario Savio and the first student sit-in of the '60s. That was us FSMers at Berkeley. [ed note: per Robert Cohen, personal communication, "The first student sit in of the '60s was not in Berkeley '64, but in Greensboro, NC, 1960."]
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It will be a little surreal. A university that had nearly 800 of us arrested in December 1964 is welcoming us back by hanging Free Speech banners on the building we occupied. We're coming home like a victorious football team! But it's not a real victory because the same forces that tried to shut us up in the 1960s have a more chilling control over U.S. college students today than they ever had over us. Today, it's not police control; its economic control."

"Our story begins in Queens, New York, in 1942. Mario Savio was born during World War II and would later grow up in the conformist postwar decade in America. Savio was, however, every bit the counterculture youth. Think of him as John Travolta in Grease - except way smarter and without the grease.
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Savio spent the summer of 1963 helping the poor in Taxco, Mexico, and the summer of 1964 in Mississippi campaigning for civil rights. (So what were you saying about how many seasons of Breaking Bad you got through last summer?) Savio transferred to UC Berkeley in the fall of '64 and majored in philosophy - and yes, he did find a job after college."

"As part of UC Berkeley events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, there was a showing of Mark Kitchell's movie, 'Berkeley in the Sixties.' Afterward, a speaker described other events planned for the occasion.
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Someone in the audience shouted, 'How can we get a list of all of these events?' 'We'll have a leaflet,' said the speaker. 'What's a leaflet?' an older person who seemed to be joking shouted.
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To which someone else shouted, 'Where are you going to put it?' 'We'll have a table,' said the organizer.
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Gar Smith assures the technologically savvy that the information is online, too, at www.fsm-a.org."

"FSM took us, the faculty, on a very bumpy ride. A few got on board when students surrounded the police car in Sproul Plaza. Most were unresponsive, a few annoyed and hostile, most assuming the disturbance would soon blow over. The mass arrests at Sproul Hall on December 2nd changed the mood, a majority shocked by the use of such force at the behest of campus administrators.
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I remember standing with Professor Howard Schachman at Sproul Hall right after the students were dragged out and arrested. We decided to enlist our colleagues to convene an ad hoc meeting of faculty that evening. That meeting in the old Life Sciences Building formed the Committee of 200, which rallied a large majority of the faculty to the side of free speech, culminating in the historic Academic Senate vote of December 8th. Of course that landslide vote marking the FSM's victory was guaranteed in advance when campus police tried (and failed) forcibly to keep Mario Savio from speaking at the Greek Theater convocation.
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We listen in awe today to the remarkably thoughtful, poetic and inspired speeches of Mario Savio, but I'm reminded that some administrators were so blinded by rage that they could say, as one did to me: 'he speaks the language of the gutter'. I've told the story elsewhere (a chapter in the Zelnik and Coh[e]n book about FSM) of my being asked for advice at high levels of the UC administration, advice that was rejected because it was supportive of the students. Moreover, adding injury to insult, a record of that 'confidential' encounter was passed on to the FBI and appeared in my FBI file obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."

"BERKELEY -- A new exhibit on the Free Speech Movement that emerged here 50 years ago will open with a free talk UC Santa Cruz Professor of Feminist and Ethnic Studies Bettina Aptheker from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Veterans Memorial Building, 1931 Center St.
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'From COINTELPRO to the Patriot Act, From Selma to Ferguson" will be the topic of the talk by Aptheker, who "will consider the legacy of FSM and its meaning for today's struggles for social justice,' according to the Berkeley Historical Society, which is hosting the event. Aptheker was one of the leaders of the 1964 movement in Berkeley that spawned campus activism across the United States.
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The talk is part of the society's Free Speech Movement at 50 exhibit and program series, which runs through April 11, 2015.
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Admission to the program is free, but donations are accepted. A reception will follow the talk,
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For more details call 510-848-0181."

"FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT PLAY Stagebridge's production FSM, an original play with music, written by Joan Holden, commemorates the 50thanniversary of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley with performances at Brava Theater in San Francisco and Berkeley Rep. Previews start on Saturday Sept. 20 The widow and son of Mario Savio, student leader of the movement, are members of the Stagebridge community and were heavily involved in the creative process and production of the play. Here's what Stagebridge says about it: "FSM takes 60's politics seriously. It celebrates the joy, moral purpose, newborn freedom and occasional absurdity of being young, part of a movement and passionately political, from a distance that takes account of the consequences." The play only runs two weekends. Find details and buy tickets at www.stagebridge.org"

"So where does all this leave us? I guess I'm still going to hang with old Uncle Ralph [Waldo Emerson].
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Sometimes things come up that are so deeply immoral that ordinary notions of civility just don't apply. Slavery was one such thing, little dispute about that these days. My genteel slave-holding Virginia ancestors would have disagreed, but they would have been wrong, as was Mr. Jefferson on this question.
¶
Another immorality, it seems to me, is the continued injustice in what the government of Israel is doing to the people of Palestine. Professor Salaita's infamous tweets were highly uncivil, but he was responding appropriately to the deep immorality we all witnessed in the last months--soccer-playing boys gunned down on a beach, U.N. schools demolished, empty apartment buildings destroyed in the most crowded territory perhaps on the surface of the earth, hundreds of innocent children killed. I myself, seeing one of the reports of what was going on in the last Gaza war, swore loudly and long in a way startling to my daughter who had never heard me do such a thing-she was surprised that I even knew the words.
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Someone, sometime, even on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, might have a similar reaction to this or a similar outrage, and it should be their right-no, their duty-to express their opinion in suitably angry words. In fact, I believe someone on that campus once, now a while ago, made a statement about this duty that's lasted for a few years and is still relevant.
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[video of Mario Savio, on the operation of the machine]
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Just saying… "

"A particularly startling example of the cult of censorship among many college administrators is a Sept. 5 email message to University of California-Berkeley students, faculty and staff from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks.
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He began by noting that it is the 50th anniversary of the extraordinary Free Speech Movement by University of California students, which would have gladdened the hearts of James Madison, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson.
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But then listen to how this university's commander-in-chief defined free speech:
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"We can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility ...
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In other words: Be polite, or shut up."

"The acronym (in this case) stands for 'Free Speech Movement.' Fifty years ago this fall, students at UC Berkeley began a series of massive protests and strikes against limits to free speech and political organizing on campus, led by Mario Savio. Those events and their consequences are the subject of a play opening this weekend called FSM. Stagebridge, a small company, offers this unique musical event at San Francisco's Brava Theater with an encore performance the following weekend at Berkeley Rep."

"In an upcoming theatrical production commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, [Lynne] Hollander will revisit the events of 1964 in a way she never has before - through the eyes of a UC Berkeley official whom students were up against decades earlier. Hollander will inhabit the role of then-Vice Chancellor Alex Sherriffs. Stagebridge, an Oakland-based nonprofit arts organization, is producing the musical production, called FSM, with performances at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco this weekend and at Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust Stage the following weekend.
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'If we do it well, it brings it all to life again,' said Hollander, an associate producer and historical consultant for the musical, and the widow of Mario Savio, a central leader in the protests. Even in the first workshops of the production, she said, 'You had that same sense of standing up for this cause that you deeply believed in and feeling very triumphant.'"

"This fall, the University of California, Berkeley, is marking the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with several dozen special classes, an experiential program for students built around the biography of movement leader Mario Savio, sing-ins and a political poetry reading, a film series, panel discussions and lectures, a reunion of activists, an Oct. 1 rally on Sproul Plaza, concerts and more.
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The movement began in 1964 when UC Berkeley students protested a ban on on-campus political advocacy and demanded their right to free speech and academic freedom. The non-violent civil disobedience tactics at UC Berkeley, pioneered by the civil rights movement, led to the introduction of reforms on many other university campuses that made freedom of speech more consistent with how it is guaranteed by the First Amendment."

"Therefore, we welcome your Sept. 12 message that you do not intend to limit or regulate speech on campus, and we ask that you take every opportunity, during this 50th-anniversary semester, to reaffirm the policy that - as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's First and 14th Amendments - the content of speech or advocacy shall not be restricted by the university. We thank you for your email clarifying that you are fully committed to uphold and affirm the proud traditions established on campus 50 years ago."

"There's a reason we describe protests against perceived injustice and the defense of ideas as 'raising one's voice': intensity of expression is often the best or only way to call to the attention of the public issues that have been excluded, willfully or unwittingly, from civil discussion. I think the freedom of speech defended by the movement must be understood precisely as including the freedom to say what prevailing conventions of civility have made 'unspeakable.'"

"This fall, the campus celebrates the achievements of the 1964 student movement that made Berkeley famous for extending the First Amendment's definition of free speech to the University of California. In those days, in what was known as the 'political neutrality' doctrine, the UC administration sought to preserve the university's autonomy from external political interference, but did so through a Faustian bargain: The university was kept as free as possible of political interference from Sacramento, but it sacrificed free speech on campus to a degree that was almost certainly unconstitutional.
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In the decades before the Free Speech Movement, students were allowed to engage in political advocacy close to campus, but not on it. Faculty members were prohibited from identifying themselves as UC professors when endorsing a political cause. When the FSM challenged this doctrine of 'political neutrality,' UC President Clark Kerr was faced with the task of enforcing an untenable set of campus regulations that sought to distinguish between 'informing,' which was permissible, and 'advocating,' which was not."

"As students, we have witnessed or participated in political action on campus, ranging from flyering to sit-ins. The Free Speech Movement of 1964 involved a range of political discourse, from negotiations with administrators to more iconic moments of campus activism. Leaving the requirement of civility hanging above students' heads without a clear definition takes away from students' ability to continue the activism that now defines a large part of UC Berkeley's history and legacy."

"We are opposed to hate speech and violence against other students, whether it is physical, emotional or mental. But free speech isn't what hurts students - the administration is. Student protests have largely been nonviolent, yet whether it was the movement to divest from South African apartheid, the Third World Liberation Front or Occupy Cal, the administration has been the one to commit violence against students. Furthermore, it is this argument of 'civility' that administrators have used to undermine student and faculty free speech, either by denying tenure to qualified faculty or by denouncing democratic, student-government resolutions. The burden of the 'civility' that Dirks calls for is on the administration that has beaten students bloody, not on students who come to our ASUC Senate and raise their voice."

"I was at the University of California at Berkeley and when we got back to campus in 1964 some people from the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, myself working with the farm workers in California . . . we come on to campus and we discover that the area in front of the school that we (all the groups) traditionally used to hand out leaflets about their events and so on, suddenly you couldn't hand out leaflets there.
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The reason we were given was trash. That is to say litter.
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Pretty soon all the groups, I mean all the groups, the Republicans, the Young Republicans, the Democrats and the Anarchists, we all went to the administration and . . . . they dropped that flimsy excuse.
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They said no, the only thing is you can't pass out leaflets on campus that advocate action off campus.
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It was obvious not only to the radicals but all the students that some . . powerful people in Berkeley had become annoyed by the farmworkers boycott and the equal employment picket lines in Oakland and had put pressure on the president of the university.
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All the groups realized this wasn't an issue about litter, it was an issue of free speech.
Throughout that year of expulsions, arrests, all the groups stood together."

"'Students do have power, and people getting together do have power,' said Lynne Hollander of the Oakland-based production for the new play 'FSM.' 'I hope that showing people their history will help people to see this, to empower them.'
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This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement - the 1964-65 student-lead protests on the UC Berkeley campus that radically altered the relationship between the school's administration and its students and blasted open new channels of expression for young people across the country. 'FSM' the play aims to begin a new chapter in the movement by commemorating and sharing the value of this moment in UC Berkeley's history."

"The FSM established that students have the fundamental right to free speech necessary for participation as full-fledged individuals, and helped inspire the antiwar, ethnic studies, women's, gay rights, and environmental movements. A half-century later, the FSM stands as a model for nonviolent mass organizations built on transparency and consensus."

"It wasn't long before the issues multiplied, due largely to the paternalistic university administration, who addressed the students as if they were children and openly reminded them of their duty to conform to the university's plans to churn out obedient technocrats.
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Absent that, perhaps the FSM would not have progressed to where their firebrands spoke about 'smashing the machine.' Nevertheless, events that followed gave us much of what soon became common: sit-ins, nonviolent civil disobedience like going limp while being arrested, and even the odious concept of approved 'free speech zones' - which, to their credit, the students derailed."

"The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley is a perfect example of purposeful, impactful rebellion. Yes, the students misbehaved. They broke the rules, they acted out. But their rebellious ways inspired ground-breaking change and they liberated themselves from unfair administrative control. It's all about intention, and their intentions were admirable. That was 50 years ago, but we have more in common with those students than we realize. College is the time to start figuring out exactly what you stand for, and what you are willing to take a stand against. One of the most important lessons that these collegiate glory days will teach you is how to be fearless in your own rebellion and to stand your ground, whether you are standing among hundreds or all on your own."

"At the meeting, External Affairs Vice President Caitlin Quinn also emphasized that the ASUC's unique autonomy should not be taken for granted. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Quinn reminded senators to exercise free speech and 'have hard conversations' for the communities that voted for them."

"And Saru Jayaraman‘s battle to raise restaurant workers’ wages is gaining traction, with profiles of the fight in The New Yorker and Saru giving this year’s Mario Savio Memorial Lecture next month, on the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Free Speech Movement."

"The University of California at Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), a coalition of students and staff who came together in 1964 to hold sit-ins and protests to demand unrestricted freedom of speech on campus. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley's current chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, has sent an email to all faculty, staff and students. Unfortunately, the email seems to suggest that Dirks has learned nothing from that great victory for free speech.
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In his email, Dirks argued that free speech is only legitimate when it is 'civil' and 'courteous': 'Free speech and civility are two sides of a single coin - the coin of open, democratic society.' It's a sign of the times that such patronising statements can be made by powerful individuals without students and staff taking to the streets."

"Colleen Lye, a campus associate professor of English and co-chair of the UC Berkeley Faculty Association, said there has been a recent tendency for chancellors nationwide to use the term 'civility' to justify restricting academic freedom.
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'Enough faculty … would very much like to hear from the Chancellor as to his views on free speech, since it is his understanding of it as conveyed in the message that has caused some puzzlement locally and has become a news item nationally,' Lye said in an email."

"Savio obviously deplores the analogy the "liberal" makes between the Chancellor and the Board of Regents-but note too that he deplores the way that relation is depicted, as the manager shuddering at the thought of uncivilly criticizing his bosses in public. The Free Speech Movement was all about non-conformity, about not being "processed" into a product. It was about freedom to be uncivil, not as a goal in itself, but as a necessary freedom toward a greater kind of liberation of the human spirit. That is how we should remember and honor it."

"When someone in power praises the principle of free speech, it's wise to be on the lookout for weasel words. The phrase 'I favor constructive criticism,' is weaseling. So is, 'You can express your views as long as they're respectful.' In those examples, 'constructive' and 'respectful' are modifiers concealing that the speaker really doesn't favor free speech at all.
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The targets of free speech never think it's constructive or respectful. Quite the contrary.
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So now here's Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of UC Berkeley, on Friday, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which he says 'made the right to free expression of ideas a signature issue for our campus.'"

"Anity Levy, associate secretary at the American Association of University Professors, said the chancellor's position was 'astonishing.'
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She continued: 'That the university which gave rise to the free speech movement should celebrate it by embracing the notion of civility is patently absurd.'
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Will Creeley, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, expressed similar sentiments. 'Instead of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement with a ringing endorsement of the right to speak one's mind, Dirks offered Berkeley a tepid, compromised vision of free speech that would, in practice, render it a hollow right,' he said via email. 'If Dirks doesn't support freedom of expression when speech isn't 'civil,' he doesn't support freedom of expression.'"

"While the strategy has so far failed at the legal level, it is succeeding with university administrations, who are rushing to issue 'civility' statements explicitly or implicitly targeting utterers of speech critical of Israel.
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It cannot be mere coincidence that Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, sent an email to the entire campus community last week also calling for 'civility.'
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Ostensibly marking the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's famed Free Speech Movement, Dirks said, 'we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.'
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What does 'civility' mean in this context? Does it mean saying 'please,' 'thank you,' 'sir' and 'ma'am' to war criminals? Or does it mean electing a sheriff instead of a professor to run a university to make everyone feel 'safe' and secure?
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(A similar statement has also just been issued from Penn State University. No particular cause is mentioned as prompting the statement and it does not mention Palestine, but I expect to see more of these.)
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Dirks, as I recount in The Battle for Justice in Palestine, was the vice president at Columbia University who, prior to taking his new job at Berkeley, boasted about his role in the witch-hunt against Professor Joseph Massad."

"The University of California-Berkeley is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement this fall, and our chancellor has made an unusual contribution to its legacy: arguing that free speech can 'undermine a community's foundation.'
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Nicholas Dirks, himself an historian, said in a campus-wide email last week that it was important to recognize 'the broader social context required in order for free speech to thrive.' He argued for the campus community to determine when free speech goes too far: 'Specifically, we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.'
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Needless to say, this is a curious interpretation of the animating principle of the movement that cemented Berkeley's place in the history books. Berkeley is the university remembered for its student dissent, civility be damned."

"Constitution Day on September 17, commemorating the 1787 signing of the United States Constitution, provides an opportune vehicle for UC students, faculty and staff to learn their Constitutional rights and obligations as citizens in a free society. Public Law 108-477 requires each educational institution receiving Federal funds to commemorate this Day with an annual educational program informing students of their Constitutional rights. In 2010, UC Berkeley invited students to attend a seminar on 'The Free Speech Movement and the Constitution.' With only UC Berkeley and UC Merced holding classes on Constitution Day, other campuses could incorporate programs about the Constitution in their annual orientation programs."

"This fall the University of California at Berkeley is marking the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement that famously roiled the campus during the 1964-65 school year. What a difference a half-century makes. On Friday Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a message to Berkeley faculty, staff and students titled 'Civility and Free Speech' that was at best a lukewarm defense of the First Amendment rights that those long-ago students passionately sought with protests and sit-ins because political speech was restricted on campus."

"For those following reports surrounding the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana's revocation of Professor Stephen Salaita's pending appointment, Chancellor Dirks' e-mail to the Berkeley community last Friday afternoon struck an awkward tone.
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A reflection on the relationship of free speech and civility sought to invoke the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement (whose legacy the University has absorbed and transmogrified for marketing purposes), the Chancellor's missive came at a peculiar time. The pairing of 'civility' with free speech clearly refers to the goings-on in Illinois, where Chancellor Phyllis Wise invoked 'civility' to defend her questionable decision to withdraw Salaita's tenured position in the Department of American Indian Studies. The subsequent stream of university presidents joining her in extolling civility underscores the backdrop against which concerned observers read our Chancellor's discourse. Our University measures conduct and appropriateness of speech in terms of Time, Place, and Manner; the Chancellor's letter failed the test on all three counts."

"It, therefore, amused me to read Chancellor Dirks' email to the UC campus community. 'Free speech and civility,' wrote the current Chancellor, 'are two sides of a single coin - the coin of open, democratic society.' What is the relationship between free speech and civility? The Chancellor does not make this clear. He affirms the importance of free speech, for after all this is a guarantee of the US Constitution not a product of the Free Speech Movement. That Movement was not about the right to speak as such. Even the conservative student leaders, such as David Levy 1964 editor of the campus magazine Man and State, agreed that free speech is inviolable. Free speech itself was not the issue. The FSM was about the right to express and propagate political opinions on campus property (which is also state property)."

"Sounding more like a kindergarten teacher than the chancellor of the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement 50 years ago this fall, the University of California-Berkeley's Nicholas Dirks sent a jaw-droppingly ignorant email to students, faculty and staff Friday that essentially turns free speech into an endless relativist exercise.
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Popehat has a very good point-by-point analysis that serves as the main course, but here's an appetizer from Dirks' email:
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As a consequence, when issues are inherently divisive, controversial and capable of arousing strong feelings, the commitment to free speech and expression can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation. [emphasis added]
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Popehat says:
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In today's competitive publishing environment it is astonishingly difficult to distinguish yourself as an academic by being wrong about free speech, but Chancellor Dirks is equal to the challenge. His email is so very bad on every level - legally, logically, rhetorically, and philosophically - that it deserves scrutiny.
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Read the full Popehat analysis here.
http://www.popehat.com/2014/09/06/u-c-berkeley-chancellor-nicholas-dirks-gets-free-speech-very-wrong/"

"The 1960s wouldn't have been the same without it
Take your pick from the Free Speech Movement demonstration in Berkeley, which began when someone on campus tried wearing a shirt on which he'd pinned a card carrying four famous letters; the underground magazine launched by beat poet Ed Sanders, which he called F*** You; the expletive-littered hit novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn; Andy Warhol's notorious movie, F***; or the famous political slogan from a militant decade, 'Up against the wall, motherf***ers!'" [ed note: the referenced action at UC Berkeley took place after the Free Speech Movement and was not a part of it, though likely a result of it.]

"Tate recalled his disillusionment with society and government at that time. He drove to Pasadena and on to San Francisco and Sausalito in his mail truck. Then he drove to the East Bay, where he got a job as a TV repairman. After a while, he decided to register at U.C. Berkeley.
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When he started walking toward the registrar's office, which was blocked off by police, he realized he had walked into the first Freedom of Speech demonstration under the leadership of a young civil rights worker named Mario Savio.
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'Savio was brilliant,' Tate said. 'He spoke with compassion, moral clarity; he was a source of inspiration.'"

"This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a struggle between students and university administrators over students' right to advocate for political issues on campus. The conflict spanned the course of the 1964 fall semester, focused national attention on the Berkeley campus and set the stage for anti-war demonstrations at colleges across the country.
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UC Berkeley will celebrate this milestone anniversary with a wide array of events and programs exploring the legacy of the FSM. A noon rally including speeches by Robert Reich [ed note: Reich canceled] and labor activist Dolores Huerta will look back, and ahead, at the meaning and impact of free speech and activism. (Wednesday, Oct. 1, noon., Spoul Plaza.) Saru Jayaraman, activist and director of UC Berkeley's food labor research center will deliver the 18th annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, which highlights the spirit of moral courage that Savio embodied. (Thursday, Oct. 2, 8 p.m, Wheeler Auditorium.)
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Cal Performances will present a concert by jazz legend Mavis Staples, who will bring to life gospel standards and civil rights anthems. (Thursday, Oct. 30, 8 p.m., Zellerbach Hall.) Staples will also join a panel discussion on the role of music in protest movements. (Thursday, Oct. 30, 12:30 p.m., Banatao Auditorium.) A campus "sing-in" will be open to all and will feature the University Choruses and Gospel Chorus. (Tuesday, Sep. 23, 5 p.m., Sproul Plaza.)
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Mario Savio biographer Robert Cohen will examine the impact of student activism on free speech from the 1960s to the present. (Tuesday, Sept. 23, 6 p.m., 105 Stanley Hall.) A panel of legal scholars will discuss Free Speech on the Berkeley campus, from the 1960s to the Occupy Movement. (Wednesday, Sept. 17, 4 p.m., Boalt Hall.) Members of the Academic Senate will reflect on the historic vote that effectively ended the 1964 protests around the FSM, and the implications for political speech and action. (Monday, Dec. 8, 3 p.m., Wheeler Auditorium.)
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A full list of campus events related to the FSM anniversary can be found here.
http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/fsm.html"

"Since the birth of the Free Speech Movement half a century ago, this city has prided itself on its liberal values and policies, be they generous benefits for the needy or a look-the-other-way attitude toward marijuana use.
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Now, the city is bringing those policies together with a new amenity for the poor here: The marijuana will be free."

"Despite differences of race, age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and class, students and alumni have managed to sustain close relationships with community members. As a result, a deeper understanding of select privilege is highlighted by student activism. Striking patterns across pressing social issues highlight privileges only certain social identities enjoy. Some view the work done to combat issues of wealth inequality, rates of poverty, food insecurity, education achievement and incarceration as the Third Reconstruction, a follow up to the Second Reconstruction: the southern freedom movement of the 1960s.
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Reflecting on the history of the many powerful lessons of the Free Speech Movement can help calibrate one's personal ethical compass. But with no direct experience against which to weigh such a heavily intellectual and perhaps even solipsistic perspective, our well intentioned acts can have an adverse impact, especially when collaborating with off-campus communities."

"Mavis Staples
Oct. 30
Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
Tickets and Information
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Mavis Staples was the youngest member of the Staple Singers, who were famous for 'Respect Yourself' and lending their talents to the Free Speech movement. Mavis funny as hell and she'll be performing, as she has been her entire life, with her whole heart and soul, at Cal Performances. And listen to some great storytelling by Mavis on a recent episode of Wait, wait… Don't Tell Me." [ed note: while the Staple Singers were definitely political, there is no evidence that they contributed to the FSM.]

"The 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement this year is also the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. In the turbulent river of radicalism that reached flood stage in mid-'60s Berkeley, radical environmentalism was just one branch. That is the tributary I want to navigate here. But it is good to sit down at the typewriter-excuse me, the computer-and try to remember that frenzied era in a disciplined way. Ah, the piquancy of the air back then! The smell of tear gas on campus! There were so many flavors of radicalism available that one was forced to focus. You had to pick just one or two."

"In the 1960s, Mario Savio at UC Berkeley spoke passionately against that culture by highlighting to his fellow students that they were the raw materials of the university machine; a machine so 'odious' that he urged them to put their bodies 'upon the gears and upon the wheels...to make it stop.'"

"Barry had a keen intellect, terrific sense of humor, and a commitment to truth and justice. He was actively engaged in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He attended many rallies and protests over three decades (and even spent a little time behind bars for it)."

"Indeed, this fall we mark the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, and as we do so, we must use this commemorative moment to reflect on the complicated legacies of our past, to remember that our commitment to the constitutional protections of free speech, and our own history of extending the boundaries of academic freedom, come with enormous responsibility. While we believe in the unimpeded yet civil exchange of viewpoints, we must acknowledge how difficult this is in practice. For free speech to have meaning, it must not just be tolerated - it must also be heard, engaged and debated. Yet this is easier said than done. As a consequence, when issues are inherently controversial, free speech can lead to division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation. This fall, like every fall, there will be no shortage of issues to animate and engage us all. Our capacity to maintain that delicate balance between communal interests and free expression will be tested anew. As befits UC Berkeley, the stakes will be as high as ever. As Clark Kerr, Berkeley's first chancellor, noted, we do not make ideas safe for students, but rather seek to make students safe for ideas. The most effective and appropriate way to do this is through careful attention to and maintenance of our unique -- and uniquely engaged -- academic community."

"The upheavals around the Free Speech Movement in 1964 saw Professor Cheit elected on to the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate. He went on to become executive vice-chancellor of UC Berkeley (1965-69) and would eventually serve twice as dean of the business school (1976-82 and 1990-91), as well as vice-president of financial and business management for the whole University of California system (1981-82)."

"'Planet Snowvio' was launched on the West Coast, when Critchley was invited for an artists' residency by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. 'They probably expected a performance ritual,' he says over salad at a crowded in-town restaurant, 'like the January First Re-Rooters Ceremony on the beach, where we purge ourselves of the old year. But being at Berkeley, I thought of Savio, and was already following the news on Snowden,' he says, 'so it evolved into the theater piece.'"

"UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
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The school compiles a summer reading list for freshmen (and anybody else) around a particular theme every year. Though no book on the list is required, it is suggested that at least one or two of the books are read. This year's theme is the Free Speech Movement.
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From the school Web site:
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You'll find books here that treat the people and events of Berkeley in fall 1964 and soon after. You'll also find books, both fiction and nonfiction (and some other media), that deal with other issues, places, and people that touch on the theme: freedom of the press, the women's movement, Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, and so much more.
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Books on the list include:
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Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by Robert Cohen
Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld
Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties, by Sara Davidson
I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai
Long Walk To Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela"

"Student evaluations emerged from the '60s and '70s as part of the student demand menu of 'reforms.' Perhaps it was the Berkeley free speech movement; no doubt Vietnam (which politicized a generation) had a lot to do with it. Whatever the reasons, students back then demanded 'relevancy,' 'transparency' and 'accountability.' Some even demanded more - control over curriculum, and representation at department meetings."

"It has been 50 years since the Free Speech Movement began at UC Berkeley in 1964, and approximately 40-50 years since near-riotous conditions overwhelmed college campuses in the late 1960's and early 1970's. In our own time, it is about three years since the 2011 Occupy events and large-scale tuition protests erupted on college campuses. This year, in contrast, may be a quiet Fall of 2014 on college campuses (although one never knows).
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There is one exception though, and it is a significant one - lawsuits. There is a fair chance colleges will see an increase in expensive lawsuits brought by students or outsiders to challenge campus policies in the name of free speech."

"Thirty-four years of right-wing Reaganomics has done this to Christine. Thirty-four years of government-bashing, regulation-trashing right-wing Republican economics that promises us that allowing corporations and the wealthy to do just as they please, at half the taxes the rest of us pay by the way, that allowing the powerful to dump on the weak, to pay them nothing, to fire them at will, to deny them health care, 34 years of this self-serving, un-Christian, un-American nonsense slickly sold as 'freedom, family values and Jesus,' that promises that this ugly selfishness is somehow good for the millions of Christines. It’s enough to make one sick. Or take action. Effective political action.
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I quote 1960s activist Mario Savio: 'There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious---makes you so sick at heart---that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'"

"Jay Critchley may just be the hippest guy on the Cape. A multi-media artist whose work has been seen internationally, whose last local happening was the captivatingly inventive one at the Herring Cove bathhouse in Provincetown, he was asked by U. Cal. Berkeley to present a piece for a show called 'The Possible,' as one of a collection of artists engaging the public and interacting with it. 'Instead of the ritual they may have expected me to do, I did a more formal piece,' he said, creating Planet Snowvio, a one-act musical. 'I recruited people on craigslist, like my musical director, who used a nine-piece orchestra for the Berkeley version.'"

"Jack Weinberg, a free-speech movement activist and graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, once told a TV reporter, 'Never trust anyone over 30.'
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That was in 1965.
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Weinberg is 74 today and still working for environmental causes. Chances are he trusts himself."

"The double doors swung open and 6 or 8 security people with wires in their ears swept in, taking up positions at the front, sides and rear of the faculty center before Reagan entered. University cops were there too. It was a year or so after the riots in Goleta, and a few more than that after the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, so it was no surprise to see gunmen flanking a California Governor."

"This impatience with history is not new. Although the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the 1962 Port Huron Statement, acknowledged its antecedents, much of the New Left was dismissive of the past. This October, I'll attend the 50th anniversary of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, where, as a college freshman, I got a baptism in politics that helped make me an activist for all of my days. Much of the New Left that grew from that movement was openly antagonistic to tradition."

"The essayist appears concerned that young people, particularly those with an education, do not harbor a rabid fear of socialism. We should perhaps recall that many of those who fought for civil rights in the 1960s (Martin Luther King Jr.), who fought for the right to free speech (Mario Savio), who fought for workers' rights (Cesar Chavez), and who fought for freedom from imperialism (Mahatma Gandhi), were not afraid of socialist policies, but rather embraced the very types of policies now deemed socialist. Prominent American activists, like Woodie Guthrie (author of 'This Land is Your Land') and Pete Seeger, have supported socialist policies and guess what? Norway, the country at the very top of the aforementioned Human Development Index, follows health and education policies that American conservatives regularly call socialist. (There is too little space here to mention all of the American heroes of the 19th- and 20th-century labor movements who were affiliated with socialist organizations.)"

"In 1964 at UC Berkeley, during the Free Speech Movement, Cheit was elected to the Emergency Executive Committee of the Academic Senate. The following year, he was appointed executive vice chancellor of the campus. In 1965, he also chaired the Wage Board of the California Industrial Welfare Commission."

"When she came to San Francisco State University in the fall of 1964, she was immersed in a caldron of progressive political action. The Free Speech Movement taking place at UC Berkeley had a deep influence on what was happening at S.F. State."

"9. Free speech championed by an iconic movement
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Without UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, 8-year-olds across the nation wouldn't be able to dramatically end arguments with, 'It's a free country - I can say whatever I want!'"

"Edward Snowden, NSA Whistleblower meets Mario Savio of the historic Free Speech Movement (UC Berkeley, CA 1964) in PLANET SNOWVIO. Multi-media artist Jay Critchley will present a staged reading of his new experimental musical PLANET SNOWVIO on Saturday, August 23rd at 7:30P to benefit the Provincetown Theater. The one-act play is based on the meeting of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden & Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) which transformed political & anti-war protests nation-wide and beyond. On their journey to PLANET SNOWVIO they encounter Russian President Vladimir Putin & US President Barack Obama. This political satire is sprinkled with humorous interpretations of classic pop songs. Critchley stated, 'Recalling the significance of 1964 I read the biography of Mario Savio while closely following the dramatic revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. This inspired the creation of PLANET SNOWVIO - where these two historic, radical & patriotic figures meet!' The cast includes: Gabrielle Calixte as Mario Savio, Solomon Peck as Edward Snowden, Solomon Peck, Bragan Thomas as President Vladimir Putin & & Kevin Doherty as President Barack Obama. PLANET SNOWVIO mixes historic speeches with musical pop parody including: Savio & Snowden singing, "I Got You Babe" & a Putin-Snowden duet, 'YMCA'. This mash up leads to 'You Don't Own Me' by Leslie Gore. PLANET SNOWVIO includes a poignant reminder of the radical change that is happening in the 1960s with the seminal civil rights ballad, 'A Change is Gonna Come' by Sam Cook & more. Musical Director is John Thomas. PLANET SNOWVIO was first presented at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley, California last April to rave reviews."

"California's restlessness also influenced the culture and politics of the state. The ferment of the San Francisco Bay Area, home years before of socialist writer Jack London, produced a bitter general strike in the 1930s, the radical, reformist International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Union, the powerful protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1960, protests against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War later in the decade, and the Free Speech Movement."

"IF THE 1960s can be said to have ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon in August of 1974, then that defining American epoch essentially began a decade earlier, almost to the day, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Throughout 1964, elements of a distinctive culture of "youth" had been falling into place. The Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement, the music-transforming invention of the cassette tape, the Civil Rights Act, the Beatles' world tour, the War on Poverty, the Warren Commission Report, the Second Vatican Council, the pill-based rise of feminism, a 'riot' in Philadelphia's inner city -- such were the trend-setting events that gave rise just then to a new counter-establishment that stamps American style, ideology, and politics to this day. But no echo of the '60s still resounds more than Tonkin, because of what it eventually came to justify: the nation's soul-destroying skepticism toward its own government."

"The two-floor Café Med, with its familiar blue-and-white awning, has witnessed much over the decades, such as the Free Speech Movement, Beat Generation poets, and the creation of People's Park just around the corner on Dwight.
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Open daily until midnight, it draws scores of students, artists and others.
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On hand recently was street poet and city poet laureate Julia Vinograd selling her latest Zeitgeist Press book called 'Night.'"

"This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement - - massive demonstrations at UC Berkeley sparked by the university's ban on political activity on campus and its attempt to clamp down on students trying to raise money and awareness for the civil rights movement. It galvanized what became the anti-war movement.
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But 50 years later, at universities across the country, we have gone backwards in our protection of free speech.
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A group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), formed in 1999 by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Boston civil rights attorney, rates universities on First Amendment compliance. FIRE has HSU at 'red light,' which is its most alarming level. To get a red light, a university has to have at least one policy 'that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. ... In other words, the threat to free speech at a red light institution is obvious on the face of the policy and does not depend on how the policy is applied.'"

"When the work was done and our stories filed, Margot thought out loud-in an email to me from New York City-about her own political awakening.
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'When I was 18, I was in the free speech movement at Berkeley, and we won,' she wrote. 'And it made me a totally glass half full person, forever, although I have been sorely tried in the last 25 years.'
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That sensibility informed her reporting, I think, and her absolutely brilliant style of storytelling-optimistic, curious, but also skeptical."

"The daughter of Kurt Alfred Adler and the former Freyda Nacque, Margot Susanna Adler was born on April 16, 1946, in Little Rock, Ark., and reared on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
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Her father was a psychiatrist who helped continue the work of his father, the distinguished Viennese psychiatrist Alfred Adler, who was first an ally and later an ideological adversary of Freud.
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Ms. Adler graduated from the High School of Music and Art and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was active in the free speech, civil rights and antiwar movements.
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After earning a bachelor's degree in political science from Berkeley, she received a master's from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 1982, she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard.
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Before joining NPR, Ms. Adler was affiliated with WBAI in New York, serving as the original host of 'Hour of the Wolf,' a show exploring the work of noted science fiction writers. The show has been hosted by Jim Freund since 1974."

"In my eyes, Adler was one of the many prominent Jews in the 1960's counter-culture who, like Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, rebelled against the established order. She participated in the free speech protests in Berkeley and was one of many New York Jews who went south to join organizing efforts as part of the civil rights movement. Her activist roots included traveling to Cuba to cut sugar cane as part of the Venceremos Brigade. While at WBAI she shared an office in the National Press Building with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at the time he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam."

"Mike: I wrote Don't Go Near the Water. It's clearly a song about environmental issues and this still holds true today. Student Demonstration Time is about Civil Riots and Anti War demonstrations, of the 1960's, The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Rioting at People's Park, Isla Vista Calif., The Jackson State Killings and The Kent State University shootings. A whole lot was going on in The USA at that time."

"Upon returning to their institutions of higher learning following participation in the Civil Rights Movement, many college students were no longer willing to quietly accept the university's participation in institutional racism and research to serve the military-industrial complex. Mario Savio returned from his time in the South to assume a leadership role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. And increasingly college students, despite their draft exempt status, were drawn to protest the Vietnam War. While much of the antiwar activity was directed at the draft, whose primary victims were minority groups and working-class youth, it should be noted that protesters were also concerned about their responsibility as American citizens for a government which was dropping napalm and cluster bombs upon the Vietnamese people."

"Beginning in 1959, the Troupe performed silent shows-if not exactly mime-but their style quickly evolved into a form or commedia dell'arte, featuring stock characters in masks, the better to lampoon figures of the establishment while tackling the major issues of the 1960s (the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement). The concept of 'guerilla theater,' a term coined by Troupe director Peter Berg was part of the group's political DNA (Berg and his partner Judy Goldhaft were arrested performing at Free Speech Movement demonstrations in Berkeley). It became synonymous with the Mime Troupe, and vice versa. Berg later went on to co-found, the Diggers with Emmett Grogan, a collective that brought a sense of theater to their charity work with the hippies and the poor, hanging a sign in the 'Free Store' that declared, 'It's free because it's yours.' (The concept confounded many a visitor.)
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Often the group was too hip for the room, which happens when the 'room' is whoever wanders by on the street. Their 1965 Minstrel Show, Or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, was performed in black face and offended some-both black and white. In another piece, written by Berg, an actor playing a military policeman paraded prisoners into Berkeley's Sproul Plaza and began to abuse them. 'An ROTC officer in the audience actually congratulated the MP for the way he was handling his men,' Berg later recalled."

"Occupy lacked the intellectual backbone of our parents' revolution. At least SDS had Harvard - this was just a hodgepodge of hipsters failing even to heed Lenin's warning, bent more on rebellion for rebellion's sake than on real collaboration. Without a Mario Savio to represent it maturely and with poise, Occupy was difficult to take seriously as a legitimate attempt at social upheaval."

"The ISC [Independent Socialist Club] had been founded two years earlier among leading socialists and activists at the University of California Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement took place in the fall of 1964. The political inspiration for the ISC was the veteran revolutionary Hal Draper, author of 'The Mind of Clark Kerr,' an article about the president of the UC system that became the bible of the Free Speech movement."

"How did the Vietnam War transform this brand-new utopian campus? Inspired by my interviews at the park, I decided to investigate in the UC Irvine Archives and Special Collections at the Langston Library.
A sleeve of 35mm slides from October 4, 1965, opening day of the University of California, Irvine reveals many buildings still under construction, and bare ground dotted with fragile saplings staked to posts. Smiling girls with bouffant hairdos and boys with crewcuts carry armloads of books through William Pereira's vision of the perfect future-all space age cement curves and expressionistic patterned facades.
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Just a year and a half later, the students don't look as happy. In a fat folder of slides from January 23, 1967, I find young people assembled with unmistakable seriousness on the steps of the Gateway Plaza to protest the firing of UC President Kerr for his lenient treatment of Free Speech Movement activists (at the urging of recently elected Governor Ronald Reagan). The students are holding hand-lettered signs that say: 'In Memoriam Clark Kerr' and 'R-E-A-G-A-N Doesn't Spell FREEDOM.'"

"That pivotal year also saw the beginning of the Student Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, which led to the May 2nd Movement, when more than 1,000 student demonstrators gathered in New York, along with others in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and other cities, to protest the Vietnam War, ultimately contributing to the end of Johnson's presidency. Fifty years later, the role of students was instrumental in the election and re-election of President Obama, and, not unlike with the protesters of the 1960s, questions persist as to whether young people will stay involved when they face the reality of the difficulty involved in changing national policy."

"This fall will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement on the campus of U Cal-Berkeley. One can expect a number of reflections and retrospective studies, and indeed I'm working on another piece that examines student activism then and now. I want here to ask some questions, focusing especially on the experience of students at Catholic colleges and universities."

"Born in New York City in 1943, Ruskin moved to the West Coast in the 1960s to study at UC-Berkeley and got involved in the free speech movement and other progressive causes. Although he received his bachelor's degree in history, Ruskin spent much of his time on the university campus 'philosophizing,' said his former classmate and friend of 50 years, Frank Kotlier. And while he didn't run for elected office until several decades later, 'Ira loved politics, he thrived on it,' Kotlier said in his eulogy."

"And last week, Modesto Junior College got a mention in a Times story about lawsuits filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to combat the suppression of free speech on college campuses across the country.
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This, from that:
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'The group previously filed two similar lawsuits, including one last year against Modesto Junior College in California, after staff members told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the college's 'free-speech zone.' The college settled the lawsuit for $50,000 and dismantled the zone.'
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That describes perfectly the difference between the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s and the apathy of today: In the 1960s, thousands of people protested on the college campuses to demand free speech.
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Now, we sue for it."

"Ruskin was born Nov. 12, 1943, in New York City and moved to Miami when he was 13. He headed West to study at UC Berkeley, where he was involved in the Free Speech Movement and became an advocate for civil rights, women's rights and environmental causes.
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He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1968 and went on to earn a master's degree in communications from Stanford in 1983. He worked as a marketing and communications consultant before entering politics. His death before the holiday weekend saddened many.
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'As a UC Berkeley undergrad, Ira took part in the Free Speech Movement and responded when Cesar Chavez asked students to give the Delano grape strikers their lunch money in October 1966 during a rally at Sproul Plaza,' wrote the United Farm Workers on their Facebook page. 'His commitment to good causes never wavered.'"

"No question about it, Freedom Summer, then and now, had a decidedly left-wing tinge. At one point the Holly Springs newspaper carried a banner headline announcing that that the brother of one of our project leaders was a member of the Community Party. This was hardly surprising, since half the people in our group were members of one of the left-wing organizations that were beginning to appear on campus at the time. Mario Savio, who led the Berkeley Free Speech rebellion a few months later, was a Mississippi volunteer. So was Abbie Hoffman. Fifty years later, several panelists and one documentary movie were still plugging Fair Play for Cuba."

"If Berkeley does anything to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Mario Savio's speech on top of a police car (he took off his shoes so as not to scuff the paintjob), the World's Laziest Journalist will probably take some photos and write a column about the symbolism of the event."

"In her remarks at the launch event, LBNL CIO Rosio Alvarez pointed to the 'synergistic collaboration' inherent in the BRC Program. The Lab's High Performance Computing Group has partnered with Research IT to build and operate the Savio Condo/Institutional HPC cluster that supports some of the first BRC services. Alvarez pointed to her team's decade of experience building and operating HPC clusters, as well as benefits of the Lab's engaging with 'the scale of the campus, and different kinds of technology discovery that is going on here, such as at the D-Lab and the AMPLab.'"

"Second-year student Kai-Sern Lim agreed with this point of view. 'Berkeley has a long and impactful history of being liberal, especially in the '60s with student activism for the Free Speech Movement,' he said. 'Even individuals who aren't up to date with how Berkeley currently is will have some sense of the activism in Berkeley because of its roots.'"

"In 1966, shortly after his 20th birthday, Goines took an apprenticeship with a printer who had just moved into this store. As I sit in his studio, surrounded by timeworn machines methodically thumping away, he explains that his introduction to the art of printmaking was not particularly romantic: after being unceremoniously expelled from the University of California, Berkeley, for his role in the Free Speech Movement, he needed a job and this one fit the bill. Half a century on, Goines--a distinguished if somewhat eccentric-looking gentleman with a curlicue mustache and dark-rimmed glasses, who works in a black Japanese robe--is still cranking out posters on these same printing presses. Meanwhile, right outside his front door, the Bay Area has been completely transformed by the technology industry. When I ask why he chooses to use such old-fashioned equipment in what is arguably the most technologically advanced corner of the world, he says, with a twinkle in his eye, 'These machines are very heavy, and once they are moved in, they don't get moved out.'"

"Even for a cafe that has stood in the same spot since 1957--a witness to the Beat Generation, the Free Speech Movement, and the creation of People's Park--[Craig] Becker had a hard time turning a profit, and dealt with numerous attempted robberies from the people who loitered outside his cafe. "

"White veterans of Freedom Summer recall the time as a life-changing event in their personal involvement in the movement, the apotheosis of their vision for biracial, harmonious activism. And the experience did inspire many students to stay in the state afterward and work for groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (also known as the S.N.C.C.). Others, most notably the free-speech activist and Berkeley student Mario Savio, took lessons learned that summer back to their own campuses, seeding the fledgling student movements that would grow to a revolutionary fervor by the end of the decade."

"According to [Angela] Davis, Freedom Summer was 'one of the most electrifying moments in our history" and crucial to the progress of civil rights. "How slowly news traveled then," she asserted, "but how quickly students traveled in order to change the world!' Davis reminded us that Freedom Summer inspired the Free Speech Movement at nearby UC Berkeley, as Berkeley students Bettina Aptheker and Mario Savio tried to organize students to go down to Mississippi."

"I think attitudes were changed in Mississippi. People saw that it was possible, in a wider sense, to struggle against white supremacy - and it changed the attitudes of those students who participated in that. Mario Savio, who would shortly lead the free speech movement at Berkeley in California, was a volunteer in Mississippi; so was [former Massachusetts Rep.] Barney Frank. I think it changed the attitude of these young people who came south."

"There appear to be a sameness and caution within American higher education - a sector where one would expect to find an appreciation of intellectual diversity, unconventional paradigms and free thinking, where innovative features would be celebrated, not reprimanded.
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The Free Speech Movement in the U.S., for instance, began at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, a time when novel and cutting-edge ideas about war, race, gender, class, liberation, oppression, freedom, marriage, sexuality, economics, writing, education, religion, morality, art and music were producing fundamental transformations throughout American society and throughout the world.
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Students at Berkeley were seeking to overturn the school's ban on on-campus political activities. Here are the words of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, delivered during a sit-in on the Berkeley campus in December 1964: 'There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.'
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Today, America's politicized students are more likely to be putting their bodies upon the gears in order to resuscitate gag rules or to impose restrictions on who may be allowed to speak at graduation ceremonies."

"[TC:] Have you ever been interested in getting involved with politics yourself?
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[JS:] It's funny you should ask that. There was a period when I first went back to California when I was fairly active in the Democratic Party, and then was very active in the Free Speech Movement, but it's not as intellectually satisfying as an academic career. You do have the satisfaction that you get involved in decisions that make a difference in a way that most philosophical arguments don't. And in fact, during the Vietnam War, a friend of mine who was a high official with the State Department invited me to come and serve on the State Department policy planning staff where they plan American policy. And I said, 'Not during the war.' I was so opposed to the war that I absolutely refused to do anything that would even seem to be lending tacit support to the war. So I didn't do it and I have seldom been active in public affairs since.
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It's a choice you have to make, especially in the United States. I think it's possible to combine a political career with an academic, philosophical career. But the cases of people who've done it have not been very inspiring to me."

"In 1967 I had the privilege of being one of the student coordinators of Berkeley's Center for Participant Education, a student-initiated course program that was born out of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. CPE, like other 'free universities' and 'alternative schools' that popped up around the world in the '60s and '70s, promoted student-centered learning by giving students the power to initiate and help direct their own learning, using resources from local faculty, the community and subject matter experts, including some without traditional academic credentials. By getting faculty sponsors, we were able to offer academic credit for non-traditional learning."

"While Richard Hunter, a UC Berkeley alumnus who participated in the Free Speech Movement in 1964, applauded the idea of student protests, his daughter, Eve Hunter, said the die-in lacked information."

"After decades of ambivalence, UC Berkeley is finally embracing this important part of its history. 'Though I cannot presume to speak for our current administration, I think it is fair to say that the attitude of campus leaders to the Free Speech Movement has evolved over the past 50 years, from fear to pride in what the students at that time stood up for and what they accomplished,' says Dean [Carla] Hesse."

"The Berkeley Historical Society has begun preparing for its 50th anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement, including an exhibit that will open with a reception at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St.
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The society is now looking for people who were around at the time to share their memories and artifacts of a defining time in city history.
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Linda Rosen, who is curating the exhibit, writes, 'Were you around during 1964? Do you have any recollections to share? What were the local store owners' and the community's reactions to the events and to the 1964 election?
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Were you involved in local civil rights or anti-war issues both before or after the Free Speech Movement? What were your feelings about the connection between civil rights, free speech, and the Multiversity? Does anyone have an FSM strike sign or banner, newsletter, or pin?'
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The group is seeking stories, pictures and artifacts it can use in the exhibit, as well as pins, artifacts and pictures of other causes from the decade.
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Anyone willing to share stories or materials can contact Rosen at linda44@sonic.net."

"In the 1960s, at the University of California, Berkely, which was the centre of the Free Speech Movement in America, punched cards became a symbol of what was wrong with the system. Used as they were for class registration, and as a more ominous symbol of uniformity, they were torn up during protests.
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To tear up a punch card, as student leader Mario Savio famously put it, was to liberate one's self 'from the machine.'"

"Others' lives, too, were transformed by that summer:
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[Marshall] Ganz, now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, spent 16 years as an organizer for the United Farm Workers. Mario Savio, another volunteer, became a fiery student leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley. Barney Frank served more than 30 years as a representative from Massachusetts in the U.S. House.
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Changes also came to Mississippi."

"Mario Savio had traveled to Mississippi as a civil rights volunteer in the summer of 1964. A few months later, he put the lessons he learned to use in the Free Speech Movement that erupted in Berkeley, Calif.--a forerunner of the movements for justice and democracy that would grip college campuses later in the 1960s.
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Years later, he explained the impact Freedom Summer had on him, referring to one particular encounter with a Black man trying to register to vote:
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Until then, I was sort of an observer in a certain way...but here was somebody who, because of something I had done, was maybe risking his family and facing that kind of humiliation. [The registrar] made him eat shit before finally giving him that form. He was afraid, but he stood his ground.
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That man's courage changed my life. You know, we used to sing about how we'll never turn back, ain't gonna turn around. [Freedom Summer] was the point at which it became real for me. That is, I'd chosen sides for the rest of my life."

Berkeley and the Great State U. Berkeley Public Library concludes its series "Berkeley and the Great State U: Episodes in town/gown history" with the lecture "Mario Savio and the New Politics of Town and Gown, 1964-1988." [Speaker Charles Wollenberg] 2 to 3:30 p.m. June 14. Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. Free. 510-981-6148, www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org

"I am aware that as Berkeley gets ready to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, the name Reagan can become more controversial. Indeed, he did begin his term as California governor at the time the FSM ended and ordered the National Guard to suppress the People's Park rebellion in 1969. Nonetheless, this article is about the foreign policy during his presidency."

"But "Freedom Summer" is also a feel-good story, right? The courage both of civil rights activists and local blacks -- as well as the murders -- motivated Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which gave the right to vote for millions of African-Americans across the Deep South. What's more, that summer spawned a cadre of activists committed to social change, like Mario Savio, who returned to the University of California at Berkeley and launched the Free Speech movement on that campus. It's a story about overcoming, about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice..."

"As an artist, Bobby G is trying to educate the public about the forthcoming changes and provide them with a platform - literally - to express their views. Because the formation of his socially conscious outlook on art has been shaped by the Free Speech Movement, he made available for browsing a copy of Michael Rossman's landmark book The Wedding within the War, which documents its history."

"A Spirit of Tiananmen Award was given to Ross Altman, a folksinger and activist, who recounted the days of the Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley, in the sixties. He sang some of his songs of stories from the movement, and told of Jack Weinberg, a student leader of the Free Speech Movement, who clashed with the university authorities in their attempt to silence the movement during the Vietnam War because it was not consistent with the U.S. position on communism. UC Berkeley then became a hotbed for the movement."

"Like the people they're meant to depict, every chair is beautiful and unique. Skipitares has identified a defining trait for each of her subjects and accentuated that in the design: hidden compartments for ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame, a head constantly shaking with rage for rabble-rouser Mario Savio, a gilded puppet theater/cage for Pussy Riot. Ionesco himself makes an appearance as a red plastic chair covered in many tiny chairs. Quite unexpectedly, these animated seats exude humanity."

"A quick tour of the library gives some indication of the richness and variety of the collection: on one shelf, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1888; in a display case, Mario Savio's civil rights memoir, 'Letters From Mississippi,' in a rare letterpress edition; and in a public gallery off the library's main hall, samples from the illustrated archives of Phil Frank, creator of The Chronicle's 'Farley' comic strip."

"That history meshed with Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California, still a place of immigrants and children of immigrants, with the fears and insecurities such a status brings with it. These people embrace leaders who preach populism and protest. Like the region's earthquakes, protests unexpectedly emerge with a bang. Some of them come from the right, notably those that produced anti-tax Proposition 13. Others are from the left, such as the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the Free Speech Movement. Protests have come from the old with the Depression-era pension movement; from the docks led by Harry Bridges' longshoremen's union; and from Central Valley by farmworkers under Cesar Chavez's banner."

"Baez joined Martin Luther King on his 1965 march in Alabama, from Selma to Montgomery. She later joined Cesar Chavez during his twenty-four-day fast to draw attention to the farmworkers' union struggle, and she participated in a Christmas vigil outside San Quentin State Prison, California, to oppose capital punishment. In 1964, as the campus New Left was burgeoning, she sang at a Free Speech Movement rally in Sproul Plaza, leading hundreds of students to occupy the administration building at the University of California, Berkeley."

"Winget authored, 'Grow a Pair: How to Stop Being a Victim and Take Back Your Life, Your Business and Your Sanity.' The title alone would get his book banned at the supposed cradle of the free speech movement, the University of California at Berkeley. If there is one thing universities worship today it's victims. Once open-minded institutions of higher learning are now on the vanguard of political correctness squelching any idea or discussion that may offend the views or sensibilities of the 'protected' groups du jour."

"Do you remember what Mario Savio argued at UC Berkeley when he famously led the Free Speech Movement in 1964? He said the university had become an 'autocracy' and a 'machine' -- an institution at odds with democracy."

"U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi referred to the spirit of the American Revolution and Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of 1964 - citing their 'disruption' of the status quo as something to be emulated today on a planet under siege' and in 'an economic system with growing inequality.'"

"Back in 1964, it was Mario Savio, a campus leftist, who led the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a movement that played a vital role in placing American universities center stage in the flow of political ideas, no matter how controversial, unpatriotic and vulgar. The free speech movement gave birth to the hippie movement of the '60s and '70s. The longhair, unkempt hippies of that era have grown up and now often find themselves being college professors, deans, provosts and presidents. Their intolerance of free speech and other ideas has become policy and practice on many college campuses."

"'Being called a disruptor is a high compliment,' Pelosi said in prepared remarks Saturday. 'You here at Berkeley are already disruptors in many ways.'
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Pelosi's speech came nearly 50 years after students led by Mario Savio occupied a Berkeley building and launched the 'free speech movement,' which sought to lift university bans on political activities.
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'Now, it's all about you - what you can do with your freedom to speak out, with the tools of our time: Instagram and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter,' Pelosi said."

"How times have changed. The very New Left students of that era - so many of whom now run the universities against which they once protested - have moved from support of free speech to what might be termed the 'No Speech Movement.' Or, perhaps more accurately, speech for which only those whom they approve should be allowed. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the various incidents surrounding invited graduation speakers at some of the most well-known private liberal arts colleges as well as one state university."

"For several days in the spring of 1966 we occupied the [University of Chicago] Administration Building: During the sit-in, Staughton Lynd and I taught "history from the bottom up"; Naomi Weisstein and Heather Tobis Booth taught Women's Liberation. It was a memorable and ecstatic time, with volunteer elevator operators crying out, "Second floor-sleeping, Third floor-studying." The entire sit-in debated strategies and directions in long meetings of the hundreds present, brilliantly chaired by Jackie Goldberg (just out of Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement, and later a state legislator in California)."

"The impetus to leftist politicization occurred in 1964 when the radicals in the University of California Free Speech Movement occupied the administration building in Berkeley, the first such "conquest" in the country. It led to the reshaping of curriculum in an overtly radical direction, and hiring of faculty who leaned towards those changes. It has also led to incredible ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry."

"Making Local History: Student Collected Oral Histories of the Free Speech Movement will pilot curricular materials in CAL Prep's ethnic-studies class on the Free Speech Movement to be developed by UC Berkeley's History Social Science Project."

"WASHINGTON - In the spring of 1965, when I was turning 11 years old, Jack Weinberg, a free-speech-movement activist and graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, told a reporter that young people should not trust anyone over 30.
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I'm turning 30 times two tomorrow, smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boomer generation. How ironic that seminal line of the Boomer/60's generation looks from this vantage point.
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Had Weinberg uttered those lines today, it would fire up what we now call a viral event, going global with the Speed of Tweet. Something new to argue about. The generational experts would come out swinging, Xers vs. Boomers, Millenials proclaiming their independence from it all. Partisans would look for a quip or attack line to win the moment. The phrase would be hash-tagged into infinity, hashed over into exhaustion on the cable talk shows."

"At UC Berkeley we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Free Speech Movement this year. Consider how new media might have amplified the protest on Sproul Plaza: announcements posted on Facebook, live micro-blogging on Twitter, ample cellphone footage uploaded to YouTube or synchronized and displayed on the Rashomon platform. Mario Savio and his fellow activists would likely have embraced these new tools to convey their outrage at measures taken by the university administration to curb free expression. Yet Savio's call for students to put their 'bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels' -- and their willingness to be arrested -- reminds us that speeches often must be matched by physical commitment to achieve real change."

"It's changed some, just because the money has changed it. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1973, we were food-obsessed. A group of us were starting restaurants, and juice bars, and Alice [Waters] was starting Chez Panisse, and Victoria Wise was doing Pig By the Tail [both instrumental in starting Berkeley's 'Gourmet Ghetto'], and we were a group of people who were very food-obsessed but we were a small group. It wasn't a big movement. And it was a very political movement, in fact. It all came out of this sense that we wanted to control the food and do honorable work, it came out of the free-speech movement and the antiwar movement, and now there's kind of rampant foodieism. It's still probably the best place to be a cook of any place in America. The food products are extraordinary. It's just now I feel like so many people spend their money going out to eat, I wander through the Ferry Building and I'm kind of stunned by people eating everywhere. It's still a very vibrant, exciting place to eat. But the money has changed it."

"UC Berkeley hosted many memorable rallies around that time, including a 1966 Robert F. Kennedy speech at the Greek Theatre. Sproul Plaza had been the site of contentious free speech movement demonstrations. But the scene at King's address was remarkable even by 1960s Berkeley standards.
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The speech came a month after King had shifted his focus to an antiwar stance. In addition to conservatives, King also received heavy criticism from the left-leaning side of his base. The NAACP released a statement a month before the Berkeley speech, calling King's attempts to merge the civil rights and peace movements a 'serious tactical mistake.'"

"One of his [Geoffrey W. Marcy's] students was Mario Savio, formerly the firebrand leader of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the '60s. In his office, Dr. Marcy keeps a picture of Mr. Savio, who went on to teach physics at Sonoma State and died in 1996, at 53. He was brilliant, Dr. Marcy recalled, but 'he hated writing computer code.'"

"If anything, student politicos today are retreating from the radical gains of the past. In the 1960s, students were fighting for free speech, not insisting it be clamped down on. They were fighting against university management, who actively restricted free speech for fear that impressionable young students would be turned into Communist sleeper-agents. At the University of California, Berkeley, students marched under the banner of the Free Speech Movement to topple the censorship of their university. For them, free speech was the bedrock liberty from which they could begin to enact real social change.
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It's a far cry from today, when student unions, and the so-called radicals who lean on them, have prized conservatism over radicalism. Shrinking in relevance and broadly alienated from the student body, they, like the commie-bashing professors of old, are clamping down on everything from extremist nutters to topless women in order to protect their supposedly vulnerable, impressionable peers.
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Rather than marshalling their free speech in order to change the world, students today are encouraged to seal themselves off from the world."

"One of the first creative decisions they made in the Berkeley stories project had to do with placing the play's action before and after the Free Speech Movement and taking the focus off the iconic moments many people think about when they think about Berkeley. Instead, the central characters bookend those turbulent times. While it's a story closely associated with Berkeley, the history of the FSM it isn't the story they wanted to tell."

"Bailly observed the heyday of California's inspired design ended around 1965 about the time events like the Watts riots and the Free Speech Movement protests at the University of California, Berkley, tarnished the state's golden image and signaled the era's coming end."

"At the meeting, the ACLU presented two civil rights awards. Richard Coshnear, a Santa Rosa immigrants rights attorney and activist, received the Jack Green Civil Liberties Award. And Sonoma State University junior Jesús Guzmán, 24, won the Mario Savio Student Activist Award for his work with young immigrants and with day laborers."

"I made a pilgrimage recently to Berkeley where the Free Speech Movement began, and I imagined the conviction of those who came before. What struck me is that it hasn't changed much. The trees have grown, but the students' tables, inviting passersby to join rallies for candidates, equal rights, environmental issues and First Amendment freedoms, still line the path.
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I was encouraged."

"Furthermore, as politically involved students, we understand how emotional certain political issues can be - especially when they directly involve us, our families or our friends. It takes considerable effort to be the person who looks beyond one's own opinions and makes an attempt to work with those who do not share one's own beliefs, or at the very least, a person who respectfully discusses why they feel a certain way. We all slip up from time to time. Yet the difficult path toward progress requires cooperation and dialogue, and without a conscious decision to listen to and learn from others, everyone is left worse off.
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Fifty years ago, our campus needed a movement for free speech. Now is the time for a movement for respectful speech. Hopefully, like the Free Speech Movement, it can begin here, at a campus known for leadership, and spread across the nation."

"For Brokaw, who joined NBC News in California in the 1960s the honor brings back a lot of memories. "I just turned 26 years of age," he recalled in a short interview. 'It was a life-changer for me.'
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He would go on to cover the free-speech movement Berkeley, the Charles Manson murders, unrest in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and more. 'It was a very strong team,' he remembered. 'It was very exciting. It was very hard to get me to leave. In 1972 [NBC News anchor John Chancellor] came to me and said, 'It's time come East and be a grown up,' and I said, 'I am a grown up in California.' I liked it. And then a year later: 'You've got come go to the White House.' I was ready to go then.'"

"BERKELEY -Gearing up for the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement during the fall 2014 semester, UC Berkeley has launched a new, interactive website [http://fsm.berkeley.edu/] with a visual history of the momentous events of 1964."

"Kerr's historic achievement began unraveling almost immediately. In the short run, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which came the year after the Godkin Lectures, unpleasantly surprised him. The election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1966, partly because Reagan had tapped into the public's resentment of the student protests, was another surprise. And shortly after taking office, Reagan arranged for Kerr to be fired. In the longer run, both of the key elements of the master plan were abrogated. The California state-college system is now the California State University system, and public higher education in California has not been tuition-free for decades. It is still an outstanding system, but not quite so paradisiacal or conceptually neat as Kerr believed it could be."

"[Emma] Castro graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara, then obtained her law degree at UCLA in 1977. She was admitted to practice on Nov. 29, 1978.
While at UCLA, she was impressed by a speaker at a recruitment event, Arthur L. Goldberg, a campus activist in the 1960s who was dismissed from UC Berkeley where he was a founder of the Free Speech movement, and later dismissed from Howard Law School in the District of Columbia. Castro went to work in 1978 for his Echo Park firm, Goldberg, Fuchs, Working Peoples Law Center, becoming a partner in 1983."

"In September, Katherine Towle, the dean of the University of California at Berkeley and a former director of the women's US Marine Corps, instituted a ban on all political activity on a popular stretch of campus road.
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The following month, a young civil-rights activist manning a stand on the street was arrested for refusing to show his identity card to university police. Within minutes, hundreds and then thousands of angry students surrounded the car, preventing it from moving.
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The stand-off lasted 32 hours, with students occupying the university's administration block, where they were led by the folk singer Joan Baez in a rousing chorus of We Shall ­Overcome.
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On the orders of the governor of California, hundreds were arrested, but the sit-in and the demonstration were established as the tactics of radical politics in the 60s, and Berkeley the spiritual heart of the free-speech movement."

"In September, the campus will continue to commemorate Mandela with a panel discussion during the 50th anniversary celebration of the Free Speech Movement. 'Divestment Revised: UC Berkeley, The Free Speech Movement and the South Africa Divestment Movement,' will revisit UC Berkeley and the South Africa divestment movement, and how members of the campus community created a movement that led to change so remarkable that Mandela cited it in a speech at the Oakland Coliseum after his release from prison in 1990."

"At UC Berkeley, the terms 'free speech,' 'equality' and 'expression' are seemingly ubiquitous ideals in light of the campus and city's history. In the spirit of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, the campus environment integrates its legacy into everyday life. The symbols are everywhere, from the the Free Speech Movement Cafe to the Mario Savio Steps.
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But for a core group of students on the UC Berkeley campus, the legacy of free speech at Berkeley is achieved through poetry. For them, poetry is an art, a sport and a personal outlet all in one. It's a way to let their creative juices flow. Writing poems on a variety of subjects, titles range from serious and political topics like 'Samson,' 'Cathedral,' 'Oakland,' to more humorous ones, such as 'Bird brain.'"

"'It was really serendipitous. The first thing I thought of was Mario Savio. And wait a minute! I checked the date on the FSM and it was 50 years. I'd been closely following Snowden's revelations, so I thought I'd do something about the two of them meeting, maybe a puppet thing or a music video. But then I started reading Mario's biography and this is what came out.'"

"Upon further researching Savio, Critchley discovered more similarities between the two activists. 'They both committed acts of civil disobedience based on strong personal beliefs that there were wrongs they needed to stand up [against],' he said. 'The two have so much in common, yet the world has changed dramatically. What can we say about what's happening now and what they were both about?' The best way to explore this topic, Critchley decided, was to imagine what might happen if the two met. (Savio died in 1996.)
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In Critchley's resulting musical - a staged reading of which will happen at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley) on Sunday, April 27, as part of the experimental exhibit The Possible - Snowden meets Savio, who is in heaven, via Skype. The two learn about each other's backgrounds and encounter Obama and Putin, who both want to exert control over Snowden. Ultimately, Snowden and Savio decide that the only way to escape the political maneuverings of the world leaders is to find their own planet to live on - hence the play's title, Planet Snowvio."

"In the half-century since Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, the rousing oratory of Mario Savio and iconic images of mass demonstrations have come to stand in for the 1964 movement and its legacy. But all that makes for a very blurry snapshot,' historian Felicia Viator, a Cal grad and visiting lecturer, told a gathering of students in Doe Library recently.
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To really understand the FSM and the whole period one has to go deeper, she suggested. 'Broad brush strokes are not enough.'
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Her remarks were intended as words of inspiration to kick off HackFSM, a 12-day 'hackathon' that, she said, shared the FSM's aim 'to create a free marketplace of ideas.'"

"Mark Kitchell's 1990 Oscar nominated documentary Berkeley in the Sixties covered the campus activism that disrupted the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings, launched the Free Speech Movement, fought the police at People's Park, and inspired student spokesman Mario Savio to declare: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part … You've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.' Now Kitchell is back with another stand up and cheer nonfiction film about a different movement: Environmentalism and its eco-warriors who, as Savio put it, 'indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'
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Like a classical Greek drama, Kitchell's well-crafted and briskly paced A Fierce Green Fire has a five-act structure, as each segment focuses on different aspects and leaders of the environmental movement over the past half a century, with narration by a prominent artist or activist. The title is derived from a section in environmental philosopher Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac in which he describes his ecological awakening after shooting a wolf while working as a US Forest Service Ranger: 'We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.'"

"In 1962, Bloice with others founded the first chapter of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs, a multi-racial, national youth organization, named for the legendary NAACP co-founder, journalist, author and educator. In San Francisco, the DuBois Clubs gained quick notice for leading desegregation fights targeting drive-in restaurant chains, the San Francisco hotel industry and automobile sales rooms that systematically discriminated against African-Americans in hiring. Bloice was also the group's publications editor.
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During that time, the Los Angeles Times cited Bloice as a leader of the University of California Berkeley's Free Student Union and Vietnam Day Committee, successors to the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, along with other prominent free speech and anti-Vietnam war activists, including later Yippee prankster Jerry Rubin, Conn Hallinan, Robert Scheer, who went on to become a well known journalist, and many others."

"The Sixties was a Big Mountain and there were many peaks. One such was the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964. It would wildly strain the metaphor to ask 'which was the highest peak'. The mountain was built with actions in Paris, London, Berkeley, Mississippi, Prague, Chicago, Madison, Kent State, Such mountain tops are not reached with thought. Only through action. Move your ass and your brains will follow. Build the mountain and many will see clearly.
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For those of us lucky to have been there the FSM was a long year of enchantment, passion, argument, and high speed learning-of Real Education. It pervaded every department, every classroom, every encounter, every day. I was teaching political science that year and what an easy job it was. Every class was packed, eager anticipation, students bursting with things to say and projects to promote. Books came alive and were carried like flags and eyes were flashing with excitement."

"At 68, Goines still lives in Berkeley and designs, illustrates and prints posters on the American Type Foundry offset press that he's used since 1966.
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He also designs and prints wine labels and in the early '90s completed a history, 'The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s.' It was that event that led indirectly to his career, when in 1964 UC Berkeley expelled him for political activism and he found work as an apprentice printer."

"These kids read Kerouac in coffee shops, they listened to Dylan and Baez, discussed the Vietnam War, civil rights, talked openly about sex and injustice and, most of all, saw straight through the white picket fence and blue sky bullshit being fostered on them by the older generation. It was the early beginnings of the Protest Movement, which officially began on October 1st, 1964, when a University of California student named Jack Weinberg was arrested for distributing leaflets promoting civil rights on the Berkeley campus. Before a police car could take him away, 2,000 of Weinberg's fellow students surrounded the cruiser, sat down, and refused to move.
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The stand-off (actually the first recorded sit-in) lasted for 32 hours and marked the beginning of the Free Speech Movement which shaped the '60s Generation, and frightened authorities. Some time later, when officials appointed a young man to negotiate with the FSM, Weinberg famously remarked, 'We don't trust anyone over 30.' Although he admitted later that he'd said in jest, it became the unofficial slogan of the coming counter-culture."

"Finally I leave you with a plea to all stand up for peace and justice and with the words of Mario Savio: 'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!'"

"'I like that young students are trying to discover what the FSM is like, and they're doing it through modern lenses,' said environmental activist Gar Smith, who was arrested for his participation in the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and who presented awards to the winners. 'We were limited to mimeograph machines and fliers, so this is a completely different approach to accessing information and organizing social change.'"

"And as Gelernter wrote elsewhere in America-Lite, the antiwar movement actually preceded Johnson's escalation; it was a creation of the nascent new left, about to devour the staid old left, which birthed the New Deal and Great Society:
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What caused the American mood to crumble [in the period between the mid 1960s through the 1970s]? The civil rights struggle couldn't be the answer; for one thing, it united rather than divided the country, except for the segregationist Old South. Maybe the bitter split over the war in Vietnam explains it. But that can't be right; can't be the whole truth. Antiwar protests were powered by the New Left and "the Movement," which originated in Tom Hayden's 'Port Huron Statement' of 1962, before the nation had ever heard of Vietnam. And the New Left picked up speed at Berkeley in the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and early '65, before the explosion of Vietnam. Bitterness toward America was an evil spirit shopping for a body when Vietnam started to throb during 1965."

"Of course, Berkeley and the university are supported by a long and fruitful history of social justice, advocacy and activism. That's one thing that initially drew me to this place, and it is comforting to know that when I leave, even if things change - and they will - there will always be a culture here that fosters and maintains inquiry and activism. Things are constantly changing at UC Berkeley because people ask questions - and the right ones, at that. Even if the Free Speech Movement has become a token of commercialism - some might even say a tool to market to prospective students - we would not have the kind of involvement from our campus's students today without it. Our past allows us to be where we are today and to think progressively into the future."

"A young student who gets assigned UC Berkeley for her report would learn about the post-Gold Rush years that produced the university, about discoveries from vitamin E to the flu virus, about the 1960s Free Speech Movement, and about how California's 20th century success flowed in no small part from the fact that Berkeley was the world's largest public university as early as 1912."

"Colbert had played clips from an earlier O'Reilly tirade against equality, then mocked O'Reilly for saying 'The truth is there will never be equality in this world' because different people have different (i.e. unequal) abilities. O'Reilly, Colbert agreed, will 'never be as emotionally mature as a toddler or understand how ties work as well as a middle schooler.' Pretty funny and a little bit mean. Colbert also had fun with O'Reilly's claim that hooliganism by fans at college sporting events is a manifestation of the anti-authority ethic bequeathed by the 1960s. In fact, college students were misbehaving well before that. A new biography of John Updike, for instance, relates (according to a New York Times review) that when he was at Harvard the budding littérateur performed 'elaborate pranks that required great mounds of elephant dung and the destruction of cars.' That was back in the conformist 1950s, a full decade before Berkeley's Mario Savio ushered in a decade of student protest."

"Music 128 is a class called "Music of the 60?s" taught by visiting professor Benjamin Piekut. According to him, 'This course will survey the music of the 1960s in the United States, paying particular attention to different styles of popular music. We will also study electronic and experimental music of the decade, as well as jazz big bands and small ensembles. We will listen to and read about this music in relation to the major events of this tumultuous era, including the civil rights movement, the cold war, the Vietnam War, the counterculture, Black Power, the Free Speech Movement, the New Left, and psychedelia.'"

"Protests on a university campus are to be expected, when the energy of youth and new ideas and political awakening collide. Student protests in the United States have given birth to the Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s, played a key role in divesting from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa, railed against overseas wars and agitated for the establishment of ethnic studies and women's studies programs. Overseas, student protests have toppled governments."

"The Albatross opened when the free speech movement was bursting at UC Berkeley and college students gathered here to debate -- and sometimes argue -- its finer points. Bartenders were slipping drinks across the bar when The Beatles were sweeping the nation and when people were fighting for civil rights shortly after hearing Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech."

"Most recently, in a speech sponsored by campus Republicans, Sen. Paul took his campaign against the unbridled national security state to the University of California at Berkeley (which despite the press and the Paul campaign making too much of it, is no longer the left-wing bastion it was in the '60s when it spawned the Free Speech Movement.)"

"'The Supreme Court has long held that foul speech is protected by the First Amendment, so long as it is not legally obscene,' said ACLU-NC Staff Attorney Michael Risher. 'And it is particularly ironic that we are seeing this ban here in Berkeley: The free speech movement was hatched in Berkeley, and speakers of all types have long flocked here to express themselves.'"

"If you've ever seen Mario Savio's 1964 'put your bodies upon the gears' speech-a part of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley in which he fearlessly urged his fellow students to take on a university that he saw as oppressive, tyrannical, and corrupt-then you know that you've probably never seen a display of conviction as passionate and as brazen as his at Boston College."

"The vice chancellor's letter rightly affirms that: 'Freedom and rights are not situational … we cannot pick and choose what views are allowed to be aired.' But that message is muddied if not contradicted by Vice Chancellor Young's assertion that the campus is under siege by 'outside groups' that seek to 'create discord' and 'peddle hate and intolerance.' In essence, he asserts that outside agitators are trying to stir up trouble. Sound familiar? This argument has been used countless times to discredit liberal groups exercising free speech. In fact it was used in the mid-1960s by UC officials and by Governor Reagan to delegitimize the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus."

Telegraph suffers from myths and misperceptions, said [Doris] Moskowitz, who took over the bookstore when her father, Moe Moskowitz, died in 1997. She mourns the decline of the vibrant city center.
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'It's the heart of Berkeley,' she said. 'This is where the Free Speech Movement happened, the Women's Movement, the Black Power Movement. It's the place where the city and the university come together. But as it is, it's sort of a student ghetto-slash-wasteland.'"

"On the occasion of this 50th anniversary of the FSM, and as we recognize March as Women's History Month, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the ways in which gender, race, class, and sexuality may effect one's access to freedom of speech. Although the First Amendment embraces a universal ideal in its wording, it was written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants. A woman's freedom of speech is often inhibited by fears of reprisal, for example, if she reveals sexual or domestic violence. There is almost always denial, her speech vilified, her character assassinated. Incest survivors seeking acknowledgement of their suffering and redress are viciously attacked virtually without exception, even the men who as boys were molested by their parish priests, until it became too many, the evidence too overwhelming to sustain the denial. In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one's location in the political and social cartography."

"It was complex psychedelic rock, bathed in folk, noise (Airplane), prog-rock (Starship), and a singular mix of voices, male (Marty Balin) and female (Signe Toly Anderson and the wild Grace Slick, who penned the psilocybin-laced 'White Rabbit' and 'Somebody to Love'). Kantner says it was all in the name of 'civil rights, gay-rights progress, the pot lobby, ecological reforms, prison reforms, sexual freedom, taking better care of the poor and the elderly, the free-speech movement, and let's go all the way back to the ban-the-bomb movement of the '50s, for a start.'"

"Veterans of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, an event that electrified young men and women world over, will return to campus for the fiftieth anniversary reunion this October. (If interested e-mail FSM50th@gmail.com.) FSM's most famous leader, Mario Savio, won't be there because he died in 1996.
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I'm intensely interested in the personal lives of famous people once they 'fade from the limelight'. You have this thrilling moment that defines you in popular culture…a speech, an 80-yard kickoff return…an Olympic gold medal…and then? For Savio the moment came when he gave his immortal speech on the steps of Sproul Hall:"

"Aaker was among a handful of faculty members on an elite planning committee that Lyons formed shortly after his appointment. The Aaker Model was its conscious blueprint; finding a way to reconcile the dissident spirit of Berkeley with the training of corporate executives was its visionary mandate.
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In the four slots reserved for 'core identity elements' in the model, the committee all but quoted from the Free Speech Movement that made the university an icon of change in the 1960s and 1970s. 'Question the status quo' was the first of the new Haas principles, followed by 'confidence without attitude'-without corporate arrogance, in other words-along with the intention to be 'students always,' engaged in "the lifelong pursuit of personal and intellectual growth." The fourth element was a commitment to goals 'beyond yourself' in the interest of society at large."

"Host Zahrah Farmer and her crew capture many aspects of campus life in the segment. Highlights include practice with the Cal Women's Basketball team, a behind-the-scenes look at Cal Performances with artistic director Matías Tarnopolsky, an interview and lab tour with Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman, as well as students on Sproul Plaza (the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement) and an inside peek at the Campanile, set to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2015."

"To briefly summarize the proposal, Cloyne will be shut down temporarily and turned into an 'academic theme house'; all current members will be expelled like naughty school children and prohibited from returning; a zero-tolerance 'one-strike-you're-out' substance policy will be implemented; and the beautiful murals of Cloyne will be erased, thus destroying the last visible remnant of 1960s counterculture - the very ideals of the Civil Rights Movement, Free Speech Movement and antiwar movement that the co-ops were founded upon."

"In December 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) , the largest association of academics devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history, passed a resolution to endorse the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. To quote from the resolution - 'Whereas the American Studies Association is committed to the pursuit of social justice, to the struggle against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, discrimination, and xenophobia, and to solidarity with aggrieved peoples in the United States and in the world…It is resolved that the American Studies Association (ASA) endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. It is also resolved that the ASA supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.' In this resolution, the ASA is supporting the 2004 call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel endorsed by the great majority of Palestinian civil society organizations. This action taken by the ASA has led to an avalanche of bills at the national and state level that threaten public universities with the loss of funds when their faculty support boycott activity of any kind. The response of faculty, students, and civil rights organizations like CAIR to this threat to academic freedom has been equally strong. In the tradition of The Free Speech Movement at UC-Berkeley from 1964-1965, faculty and students are uniting to protest laws and regulations restricting political activities and free speech."

"There are photographs of the free speech movement in the Berkeley archives that exist maybe nowhere else in the world, as well as records related to the early history of the Berkeley student co-op. It's likely there are a lot of surprises in the collections as well. I probably won't know what I want to release until I stumble across it and find it. Then, they'll go from being housed in a dusty vault at Berkeley to being hosted on Wikimedia Commons, and other sites from there."

"The international bodies that now exist are impotent in dealing with their illegality, hence new ones must be created. Ones with teeth who are unable to be influenced, subverted or bought off. But where and by whom? I may be wrong in my solution so then I ask you: what is yours?
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'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' - Mario Savio"

"LOCAL CONNECTION - My Sunday column began with a look back at the free speech movement on the UC Berkeley campus in the mid-1960s. One of the leaders of the movement was a Cal student named Mario Savio, who was among those arrested in a demonstration on campus in December 1964. Savio later earned his master's in physics from San Francisco State and, in the mid-1980s, taught at Modesto Junior College. In September, an MJC student was stopped by school employees from handing out copies of the Constitution because he wasn't in the so-called free speech area and hadn't reserved the space. The student, Robert Van Tuinen, filed a lawsuit against the school. While supported by an organization called Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Van Tuinen was the sole plaintiff. I stand corrected."

"Fifty years ago this fall, the Free Speech Movement rocked the UC Berkeley campus.
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The short version: It represented a clash between school/government officials who sought to stop students from promoting and raising funds for political causes on the campus by declaring rules prohibiting such activities would be strictly enforced. The administrators, in essence, had created a double standard: The military could set up recruiting stations on campus as the Vietnam War ramped up, yet students were told they couldn't set up tables at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph avenues.
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What began as an orderly protest became a confrontation when the university began disciplining participating students. And when an ex-student named Jack Weinberg didn't produce a student ID card, the ground rules changed.
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'They did the dumbest thing they could have done,' said Jim Branson, a student at the time and a member of the Daily Cal newspaper staff. "They brought in a (patrol) car. They put Weinberg inside it with a cop. The students sat down around the car."
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And stayed there for 32 hours, surrounded by as many as 3,000 people who refused to leave until charges against Weinberg were dropped. The administration blinked first. Free speech and civil rights advocates won that round because they understood and believed in their cause, defying politicians and administrators who sought to stifle dissent. But free speech conflicts continue to this day."

"After all, like myself, my friend was a product of U.C. Berkeley. There, my professor in the music history class was openly scornful of twentieth-century attempts to maintain the traditions of tonal music. Music had to break free of such straitjacket restrictions.
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The music composition majors did not agree. In order to survive in the music department, the students were constrained to write only atonal music - the more dissonant the better. The students hated this injunction and went on strike. This strike preceded the famous Free Speech Movement but it had its impact on that later student unrest. The music faculty caved and reluctantly allowed tonal music to be a student's thesis.
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Inspired by the rebellion of the music students the art students similarly went on strike -- successfully. They had been forbidden to paint representational pictures. Students who wanted to do that should take up architecture, not fine art."

"I would like to leave you with parts of two speeches which I think are completely relevant and topical, although they had different reasons for writing both of these speeches they these words apply exactly to what the US/NATO are doing today, in 2014, a year when all war, hunger and poverty on earth could have been long eradicated:
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'There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!' - Mario Savio"

"The Chicano Movement, Carlos Muñoz explains the process by which this transition occurred: 'Student protest gave birth to student movements, which developed a counter-hegemonic process to challenge the dominant ideology and the institutions through which it permeates society. But this counter-hegemonic process was eventually undermined by the strategies of repression and cooptation on the part of those who ruled those institutions.'8 As Muñoz explains, while some of the white student organizations such as SDS and the Free Speech movement were rooted in the 'white middle-class,' this was 'not true of the Chicano and Black student movements.'9 The Chicano youth movement, for instance, reflected 'characteristics related to the nature of racial and class oppression experienced by the Mexican American working class.'10 There is no clearer example of how the 'counter-hegemonic process was eventually undermined' than by observing the LSU leadership's unwavering position on Venezuela. Over forty years of shifting campus terrain, the imposition of enormous debt on students, increasing atominization and depoliticization, and the influx of wealthy expatriates into universities has transfigured the character of cultural student organizations. Now, instead of expressing solidarity and commitment to the struggles of a government targeted by U.S. imperialism for advancing working class interests, student organizations such as the UT LSU are willful mouthpieces for the most privileged, most elite segments of societies like Venezuela."

"Arguably, the best and the brightest of this select group was Lowell Levant, a UC Berkeley undergrad who made a splash in Bay Area poetry circles in the 1960s. He published in the University of California's literary magazine Occident, and was a featured reader in the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. He was active in (and arrested during) the Free Speech Movement, and joined the Artists, Musicians, Poets and Sympathizers Local of the Industrial Workers of the World in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned academe, if not his passion for verse. Disenchanted with politics and not seeing many prospects for gainful employment in the couplet racket, he dropped out of Cal to drive long-haul rigs around the West."

"Mario Savio joined one of the Palace Hotel demonstrations, was arrested and went to jail. A few months later, he stood atop a police car in Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley, the leader of what he thought might be a new age."

"The underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb reported from the front lines of the counterculture and the Free Speech Movement. The newspaper of the socialist-leaning Union of Democratic Filipinos, Ang Katipunan, published essays criticizing the U.S. government for its support of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The San Francisco Print Collective ran articles supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the American Indian Movement and the National Farm Workers Association. Coming Up!, which eventually became the San Francisco Bay Times, was a pioneering LGBT newspaper advocating gay rights.
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All of them printed at Howard Quinn at one point."

"In California, the student rebellion so characteristic of the sixties also began in 1964. Sit-ins at Berkeley and Mario Savio's speech at the height of the Free Speech Movement would usher in a youth-dominated rebellion against accepted American values and especially America's war in Asia."

"The SDS blurb is drawn from the secret FBI file of Steven Charles Hamilton, obtained from a Freedom of Information request. Hamilton had begun the 1960s as a more or less typical American kid from a working class family in Southern California. He had initially attended divinity school, but transferred to the University of California as a history major, where he became involved in the Free Speech Movement and later a founder of the anti-war formation The Resistance - a group that figures in a number of histories about that period, including in Rosenfeld's and Medsger's books. What does not get mentioned about Hamilton is that he was an early member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist formation that was active in the early anti-war movement, before becoming a founder of the Maoist, Revolutionary Union. Because of this, starting in 1966, Hamilton was put on the FBI's Security Index - a list of people to be rounded up in the case of "national emergency." From the bureau's standpoint, this made perfect sense; Hamilton was young, radical and a leader. This is the backdrop to, among other things, his being arrested during the Free Speech protest, kicked out of Berkeley, subpoenaed to appear in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and put on trial for his draft resistance activity as part of the Oakland 7 - all of which was dutifully documented by the FBI, which was following his every move. Hamilton's larger political biography, like thousands of others, gives a deeper sense of who the bureau saw as enemies and what they did about it. "

"Under George W. Bush, our National Endowment for Democracy helped to engineer color-coded revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, but it failed in Belarus. We have a long track record of meddling.
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And was it not interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine for John McCain to fly to Kiev, go down to Maidan Square, and do his best imitation of Mario Savio in Sproul Plaza?
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If the Cold War is over, why are we playing these Cold War games?"

"THERE IS A PRIVATELY owned on-campus cafe named after the Free Speech Movement, a fact which tour guides make a point of showing off. They tout it as a symbol of Berkeley students' fiery character, a "know your roots" ideal to aspire to. The titular movement began in response to administrative shutdowns of on-campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War or in support of the civil rights movement."

"The Fullerton of the 1960s was oppressive, said Browne, who recalls being tossed out of a civics class for defending free-speech and civil-rights activist Mario Savio.
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'It was a time in which young people were just sort of expected to just follow along in the lines that were laid out for them and do what they were told,' Browne said.
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Noonan remembers being silenced by school administrators when playing anti-war and pro-civil rights songs in the Sunny Hills quad: '(Fullerton) was politically pretty hard-core, perfect for us to grow out of and write about.'"

"Dorothea Lange, then a Berkeley resident, took the Thirties era photo of a farmer's wife (the image is called "Migrant Mother") that became the "go to" image for depicting America in the Depression. Mario Savio delivered the speech that some historians credit as the real start of the Sixties from on top of a police car in Spraul Plaza at UC Berkeley. Morris Dickstein wrote: "The History of the Sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times." It seemed only natural to expect that in the Bush era journalists would be clogging both Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues to relay stories and photos of the famous variations of Main Street to the rest of the world"

"Exploring the concept of free speech deserves a look into its history; some of its earliest defenders fought the repression of student and faculty voices on college campuses. The free speech movement came to a head on the University of California's Berkeley campus in the mid-1960s. Student activists, many from across the political spectrum, were responding to the UC Regents' systematic denial of freedom of expression on campus. The body had taken away students' ability to disseminate political literature on UC Berkeley property."

"A Poet Drives a Truck by Lowell A. Levant. Levant, a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, studied under notable poet and UC professor Gary Snyder and was among up to 800 students arrested in the Free Speech Movement. Levant drove a truck and died in 2010 at age 65 in the San Francisco area.
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When University of Akron psychology professor Ron Levant found his brother's moldy, mildewed poems stuffed in grocery bags in a shed, he did what anyone would do: Assembled them as best he could into a book.
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That became A Poet Drives a Truck, which UA Press is distributing, with a heady 50 copies already printed."

"I am frustrated that Berkeley continues to perpetuate the myth of its activist lifestyle for economic gain. It sells an image of the rebel protester, the ideological martyr, to a generation of youth that cannot find their way four blocks north without GPS, never mind find their way past the bureaucratic labyrinth to create substantial change. With their tuition and the gradual privatization of education (see: millions of dollars from ecologically destructive corporations like BP), they perpetuate the inequality of wealth and even endorse human rights abusers, as they have by allowing Napolitano to be their system president.
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If Mario Savio were amongst us, he would hang his head in absolute shame. Not just at the cafe on campus toting his name as a publicity stunt, but at our failure to question the status quo. To disturb the system, you don’t occupy a building which poses no strategical advantage, you don’t chant just to make yourself feel good, and you do not boast that you are creating community when really all you’re doing is attracting people who want to update their facebooks with a new “rebel” profile picture."

"Mario Savio speaks at a protest on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964 that marked the beginning of the Free Speech Movement. Today's students are so burdened with debt that they're reluctant to make a ruckus about social issues."

"The Mississippi Freedom Summer saw civil rights workers murdered and hundreds of white students going back to their campuses in the fall radicalized.
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Some of those students, at Berkeley, created the Free Speech Movement.
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African Americans "rioted" in Harlem.
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America began to hear of Malcolm X, and Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.
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After Republicans took a sharp turn to the right and saw their presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, get 40 percent of the vote - buoyed by the rhetoric of political newcomer Ronald Reagan - right-wing politicos began planning a 'New Right' movement.
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TV viewers were spellbound by an immensely strong, totally independent woman on the season's biggest new hit, "Bewitched."
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Connect the dots, the PBS show's talking head historians all say, and you'll see a year that changed America forever. "The '60s" had begun!
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There's just one problem with this story: Hardly anybody in 1964 was connecting the dots. The public generally saw these events as quite separate from each other. LBJ's support for civil rights and helping the poor were clearly connected. But hardly anyone foresaw how the Gulf of Tonkin resolution would intersect with, and ultimately destroy, his liberal domestic agenda. The Beatles sparred with Clay in a fun photo-op. But who could see any link between them and the Berkeley students taking over the university administration building?"

"Some of the latter were still alive to be interviewed for the project. In the words of lawyer Richard Buxbaum, who appears in the accompanying video, Berkeley made 'a conscious effort to rise from being a very good regional university to a global university by being much more open to the hiring of émigré scholars than other universities'.
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Two major factors underpinned their continuing impact, added Dr Spagnolo: 'It made Berkeley part of the wider circuit. The global outlook of the university owes a lot to those arrivals. And their first-hand knowledge of totalitarianism gave a different dimension to their political awareness. Their experience of fascism informed their reactions, even though they responded in very different ways.'
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Professor Lewy, who had been deprived of his 'licence to teach' at Göttingen University in 1933, reacted very badly to the loyalty oath all University of California faculty were required to sign in 1949. Sociologist Reinhard Bendix, although he had been part of a radical anti-fascist resistance movement in his youth, rejected the student activists of the 1960s as a 'mob' similar to those he had seen in Nazi Germany. Professor Buxbaum, by contrast, helped students in the Free Speech Movement (1963-64) who faced criminal charges and others in later legal disputes over protests against the Vietnam War and affirmative action."

"Also attending, Communication professor Caitlin Lawrence said she was impressed that the students took complete ownership of their learning and took the time to really ask and invest in the experts on the trip.
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After their outings, students had small-group time to discuss their findings. Lawrence said this was her favorite part of the trip as "students asked questions about citizenship and social justice and the role faith plays in how you respond to social justice." Lawrence said she was excited about the genuine interest Pepperdine students had in social movements.
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'Some people think kids of this generation are apathetic, but students at Pepperdine really care about things, and experiences like this can serve as a catalyst for students voicing their desires for change,' Lawrence said. Even if nothing incredibly specific results from these ideas, 'its exciting that those conversations are happening.'
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Sophomore Elaina Duran participated in the free speech movement group. She said after the trip she felt inspired to get more deeply involved with the groups she is passionate about and promote the beliefs that are important to these organizations."

"Pete Seeger made the Free Speech Movement seem almost inevitable. I was there for the FSM, and there was a fair amount of folkie guitar strumming. I believe "We Shall Not Be Moved" was sung. If one followed Pete Seeger's view of the world, one would inevitably end up with a mass of people demonstrating about something."

"In the Bay Area, Seeger's influence and advocacy could be felt in any number of social and political moments over the years, from the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam War protests, civil rights and antiwar marches, right up to the demonstrations by the Occupy movement."

"We should also hold another commemoration this year. The first major student protests of the 1960s began in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, which civil rights activists in the South inspired. The Berkeley event opened the door to student protests across the country against racism, the Vietnam War and other betrayals of the nation's ideals.
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A new generation of protesters is already in the streets today, God bless 'em."

"A guy getting arrested by nasty-looking cops, with a big crowd looking on. That's Mario Savio, leader of the "Free Speech Movement" at the University of California's main campus in Berkeley, in late 1964. This was around his 22nd birthday, so he certainly qualified as one of the young people that other young people were looking up to at the time. But his hair isn't especially long. (In fact, his hairline was already receding.) He's wearing a jacket and a tie. He was an activist, but he was no hippie. (Until 1966 or so, when people heard the word "hippie," they thought it meant "jazz musician," like in the 1963 hit by the Philadelphia girl group the Orlons: "Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street." South Street, then as now, was Philly's "Greenwich Villa